


enjoy your youth, sounds like a threat

by balloonsleeves



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Festivals, Fluff and Angst, Fugitives on the run, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Stargazing, another six month camping trip fic, ed and ling are both very gay, greed is a reluctant wingman, heinkel and darius are begrudging dads doing their best considering the circumstances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-04-23 16:20:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 54,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19154623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balloonsleeves/pseuds/balloonsleeves
Summary: Bled into every aspect, he’s always been avaricious brought up to a point of twin breaths in the same mouth, two sides of the same coin in the being of his soul among the thousands, synonyms of want. Edward’s hands placed either side of his hips, Edward’s hair spilled around alight like a halo of flame, Edward’s lips moving so slowly burning him and turning his leg weak, Edward, Edward, Edward—Well. He wants, a lot.Ling’s heart gives a hungry tremor for a sort of starvation he’s not felt before. For a moment he lets his gaze fall down the length of Edward entirety, finally saying with eyes averted back again, “So I guess this is your disguise? Wear actual nice clothes for a change and your hair down so no one can tell the difference?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: put it into two chapters because the formatting was feeling kind of off 
> 
> this was meant to just be a quick 1k about these two being cute but turned into an obligatory fic on my take of the six month camping trip from hell
> 
> • title comes from regina spektor's song 'older and taller'  
> • this fic contains various shenanigans with the angst that comes with two idiot kids carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders  
> • ling and ed are both disaster gays, but two distinctly different types of disasters  
> • im absolutely sick of looking at this sitting in my docs

 

Ling thinks: I’m so screwed.

The familiarity of its recurrence almost is enough to placate him— _almost_. He continues pacing the forest flooring, feverously ignoring the desultory comments of a hit too close to truth whispered between grinning lips of a demon made from thousands placed into one all together stuffed in so tightly Ling thinks he might burst. That thought isn’t new, either.

But as his thoughts turn sharp to Edward’s skin Apollonian in a lazy drag blooming up his neck and check—chin jutting out to war _just so_ it hits streaks of taken moonlight and stolen sun behind the white snow can grab first, so much it’s addicting, to stay and watch (dangerous, too, treacherous parts of being raised highborn whisper) that he’s transported back to Tibet, Xing.

He marks his age in the attempts on his life, which is morbid and awful, and Lan Fan tells him as much but it reminds him in a stir gut way what this is all for. All being the scrutiny—the lessons, the studies, the breeded conquering that has been passed as white-hot, stubborn determination in more than just genetics of a leader. Because he carries the livelihoods of his people in a strapped on sisal.

He sleeps with it, speaks with it, fights with it because it’s never been about just him—hasn’t been since he was six with the tic of the third solicit assassination. That the first time he’d been closest to mistress death, and made sure to be last.

 _You are their future and their blood,_ said his mother as the fact unspooled before him. _Open failure for any lord is unacceptable, strength and victory the only trophies able to be displayed bare._ Had told him: _Choose one_.

It was that hit of brutal honest that bruised worse than the first assigned (before Fu took over entirely) defense teacher’s precision strikes and hurt even more as he nurses himself up again at night in bed. The one Lan Fan had to bring him down from, cutting his breath back to even with the same practiced talent she shows in deadly, point-blank aim with a kunai, silence the counted shivers that seem to loud in a room filled with silence. The dangerous skip of a heart beat. The panic.

Still he loves his mother all the more for it, though.

Because, she lead him from death a many with carefully crafted affection.

It doesn’t run deep, just the minimal acceptance grazing his bones that's borne from a blood taut connection of caretaker and the carree.

But this time recognized the red and gold in his peripheral. Senses that soul-warm force, unique to every person. His breathing clouded by gentle, _yeah, it’s Ling,_ said in the velvet soft way that rubs nice whenever Edward turns to it, the blunt and unclouth tenderness sat hearth-by next to a fire of rage and expressions to full that he runs to chance of bursting. Steel grip ironed by a constant fight for a right to live as of being employed by military holding him up, the pad of his thumb cursing circles through cotton forearms of Greed’s thinly lined parka. A problem; his mind identifies. A solution; his heart pulses wildly.

There’s a lot of both, as of late, when on the run from immortal military lead dictatorships and centuries worth of cover-up conspiracies brewing at the heart of a war against everlasting life. But, alas.

“We have another problem,” Darius announces, open in arms, a passing conductor of this group of fugitives and their plus one, “there’s only one day left of rations and at least a five day trek until we reach the closest town over.”  

Greed perks his head at that, as does Ling, strange as it is coexisting, his movement meaning the others turn to as they’re minds are two and body one. The rush of gestures, wandering, and emotions that weren’t of his doing is taking some getting used to, the yell of shared lifeforce even more so.  “How the hell did we run out of food so fast?” he asks.

Stony-eyed, Heinkel and Darius share an impassive stare at the prince, immortal, and alchemist at once.

“You,” bluntly blames Heinkel.

Shifting the stance in his boots, Darius adds: “The two of you are literal vacuums when it comes to food. Like I get you’re growing kids and all but damn.”

In short order, Edward turns on them in his stomp ahead, a garrison of retorts lined on his tongue in natural standing Fullmetal Alchemist standard. “ _Assholes._ _I_ have a legitimate medical reason as to _why_ ,” he snarls, brutish. “Automail ain’t easy to lug around y’know, even this lighter stuff my mechanic hooked me up with.”

 _I have high metabolism,_ Ling comments mildly on that same train of thinking. _I guess that still stands even with the Philosopher's Stone embedded in me._

 _Me,_ Greed argues. _My Philosopher's Stone._

“You mean that blonde girl?” Heinkel says, slowly ascending another few feet forward, forcing their steady pace again. “Taken by Scar? She was a Rockbell, right?” Edward jerks his head up stiffly.

Says, “Yeah.”

“Oh shit,” says Darius. There’s a connection there, a story behind the unspoken words that follow the broken-off awkward ends of the conversation they carry that neither Ling or Greed just seem to _get_. Missing something big, obliviousness bleeding through the moment.  

Fluidly in motion, Edward fists a white knuckled grip into the lowest of his pockets of his new black jacket hard, scraping his face as a blank canvas. “Yeah well, she should be fine if Al got to them in time. By now he should have taken them to a village right under the government's noses for the time being.”

“Well your brother and friends might be fine, but we still have a big problem,” Darius interjects, and sweeps an arm indicating the many latched, travel carry-on pack.

“Aren’t the both of you chimeras? Can’t you hunt?” Edward asks.

Heinkel grits his teeth. “No,” he says, sharply. “I’d rather not.”

“This isn’t helping with the food problem,” Darius says.

“Shut up. We don’t have a food problem.” Scoffing, Edward bluntly shoves past them with his flesh arm. “As long as you idiots don’t keep stomping and scaring off every little thing living in this shit forest then I can handle getting enough food for the all of us.”

Darius mutters out the side of his lip, “You’re the one stomping.”

“How?” Heinkel asks, bushy brows graying blonde pushed past the upper rimmed black of his glasses by curiosity.

Edward stares, deadpanned. “Uh, ever heard of snares?”

Those twin bushy brows raise higher along with Greed’s attention strangely enrapt by how far they’ll go. “Where did a little kid like you learn that?”

“Fuck off I’m not some microstophic runt!” he cries, fist catching in the same manner of a child’s tantrum, which Ling finds more adorable than he probably should and Greed’s scratchy laughter only cements that as fact. Edward sighs, the fire still there but the antics draining like washing cooking oil, mumbling, “I taught myself when me and Al were dropped off at an abandoned island for a month by our teacher. Would’ve starved otherwise.”

Darius looks at Heinkel, and Heinkel looks at Darius. Ling can’t help his head from spinning from the alchemist to the chimeras in a manner lost on both, wondering _what the fuck_ is wrong with Amestrians because Xing tutors—lined by his mother then his clan leader in her place when absence reached its ugly claws and took—didn’t drop two kids off deserted at the shore of an island for a quick lesson of maths.

Until there was that one teacher fired a day after hire who wanted to send him into a nest of vipers before Fu interfered. Well, Ling thinks, maybe they aren’t so different.

 _No shit,_ is Greed’s reply. _That’s really fucked up kid. The hell?_

“I don’t know if you’re just screwing with us half the time when you say crap like that,” Darius grunts and Edward growls wolfishly, an exchange bordering animalistic and teetering insane.

“Yeah, yeah believe whatever the fuck you want. The fact is I can actually get shit done so just watch how I do it because I’m not being the only not useless one here,” he snaps stalking off a few feet before wincing and hesitantly hugging a hand for some sort of comfort to his lower abdomen.

A hand bandaged wrapped to hide the red markings staked by immortality inches with fire steaming under his skin and in his blood to extend and touch the spot between biting shoulder blades held against in stalemate, to ease them to bow in aversion to the tightening tension.  

“Save a kid from being impaled by a construction beam then follow him on his fantastical  quest to save the goddamn world to make sure he won’t die puking blood and this is the thanks you get,” mutters Darius with an agreeable slap on the back from Heinkel. They still glance over to take value of the hunching boy trying too hard to be strong. Worry flashes but is buried in the flaking snow.

“ _I’m_ not useless,” Greed pipes in finally and like rainwater the tension washes from them all, colored over with a ridge of impassiveness. “ _I’m_ the boss of you guys.”

“You’re a dumbass,” mutters Heinkel low enough to be missed by human ears but Greed has been baptized in blood wrung trials as Homunculus born again so his miss nothing.

He, flounders for a momentary second, squawking definitely that, “I’m not the dumbass! You two are the dumbass!”

“Y’all are dumbasses,” offers Edward, politely. From the ground where he’s sitting so Greed leans over and tugs harsh on flushing flesh because they’re all actually dumbasses, Ling included.

“So,” he huffs, “we’re stopping. In five days. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Heinkel.

Darius hums. “God, hope there’s a bar. Doesn’t matter how shitty or cheap. Need a drink after all this bull.”

“We _deserve_ a drink after all this bull,” Heinkel grunts.

“Two chimeras walk into a bar hopefully to never return and leave me the fuck alone,” Edward hums absently. Then quiets, glancing openly at Greed, who stiffens, statue still, before diverting his gaze as if he was found with a hand already halfway in a cookie jar.

And Ling wants to face palm dramatically because for a prodigy he’s so _stupid_. With palming through peoples and demons drives alike, having to get a feel for every surface, ridge, and dent that he forgets sometimes the bumps are still sore to crafted touches.

This shared existence is a two way street, dual-edge blade still sharpening on a wet stone as flashes of moments and past while Greed _remembers_. He understands the vastness of Xing, ocean side terrace and sand dunes ruined into desert and sharp pointed hillscapes stone pillars in there farmland. In exchange Ling receives the blunt end of violate emotions in a shivery daze with faces to names to animals to facts.

Like how Dolcetto chewed ravishly on a fine dine T-bone hourly before he took notice, overbearing and embarrassed by eyes gone wide as saucers because he’s loyal to a fault and has always upheld a high rank of faith in each of their disgraced bones; when Roa for such big heads and tough brawniness could whisk at batter with delicate vigor treating them in the afterhours with different assortment of desserts he claimed to learn from a friend in childhood; how Ulchi, for all his swooning and cat calls, with turn red through the genes of cold blood and dangerous fang at the beck and call of a flirty wink leaving him weak in the knees; Bido who scampered unreachable to the ceiling at confrontation of a hand played cheap in a table game of cards; no secret left unheard Martel because snakes have a way with whispers and pipes but never said a thing because she, like the rest, was a soldier foremost and never sold out one of her own.

Human experimentations he stole for his own that continued to perplex him in open optimism, unruly trust, and sure-footed loyalty so different to his soul tide relations of immortal beasts like him in theory but never could get the specific extents of a sin all his own unable to grasp.

Around him, conversation around them cloys heatedly. Closes in. Carbon skeleton endures it; the crickets, the wind, the snow crunch, the voices that rope too tight around him. Imprint.

Greed slinks away, silent.

 _They were your friends,_ Ling realizes when they’ve taken off far in the tree foliage, holding steady to the sight line of the rest straight on. _Your family_.

Twin sensations spread aching through the both of them, something bruised and raw deep inside flaring at the gentle touch of mention and Greed recoils pulling himself up through the tension, hissing: _You don’t know what the fuck your talking about_.

 

**_________**

 

The town—snowdropped, a rotating busy of solstice shoppers and travelers spotting a mapped point as a quick stop off, venders out spread along vast under the breadth of colorfully pitched tents and stalls, filling the pronged streets of dark buildings and white streets with a fragrant of lively color—is teeming with MPs and crude posts of three listed wanted wearing faces familiar. It’s not perfect but enough, for now, if only to grab gear and necessities.

The shattering of the peaceful tourist trust is up in the air, Ling knew and feels it the same way there’s the cautious suspense of a child lost to a maze of decorated walls of past victories to a people unknowing playing with fate in the shape of an assassin’s dagger quick to the jugular.

His feet itch to leave, claustrophobic in the restricting shoe-wear popular in Amestrian fashion, toe slightly tapping, ready to bolt. He forces the nervous tick down his throat as passerbyers drifting curiosity snatches onto him. He could run, he could leave. But—Edward’s here and so are the stake of fifty millions lives. And besides, he’s always grinned in face of the challenge of taming a beast. Of all the times for Greed to succumb to quiet, a poor imitation to sleep.  

Like a watered down and album pressed photograph there’s a faint idea of never needing sleep but wanting it just like everything else—purple eyes lidding over slowly with sleepy smiles, always the last asleep as a watchful immortal eye, a last ditch effort shield if anything were to happen to the group that was his, family made his own; according to law of a dead man’s memories. Through the deluge fogging their mind Ling can spot the thought more and more filtering through the walls built on tormented screams like a photo-reel flashing to the best and worst moments of a time that feels ancient now.

They’re becoming him, just like his are becoming Greed’s. Scarred flesh like scarred flesh.

He feels it should scare him more.

But since his stride to conquer found route of the ruins of a golden kingdom slaughtered on it’s knees to man-played-god—seen the dust chafe along the loose living sand, seen how destruction had rained down in obsidian black—he knew he would burden anything for his people’s suffrage, fact he’s cut his teeth on. His body to his people, his voice for their distress, his will put-up to their survival. Anything else would be cheating them all of a gifted life lived so far.

So far gone in a dissociated haze used to get by the days a ghost in his own body the familiar minded-sense of a twisted presence half animalistic, half humanitarian goes off mute in the back of his head trained at attention. He jolts jerkily, eyes refocused again as boots a size slightly off stumble haphazardly to derail from the snow trodden streetway in markedly crunches.

“Hey Greed,” grunts Heinkel, rounding toward him.

Ling smiles sunningly. He sticks out an enunciated hand and schools his expression willfully calm again. “It’s Ling, actually. Greed’s currently resting. I don’t think we properly met before, especially considering all the trouble previously gone through.”

Heinkel looks him over, Ling never once shying away, shoulders pulled back and chin tipped, never letting himself fall over the awkward the chimera layed out so plainly. Eventually, though, he must reach some conclusion and finishes with a heavy handshake, says, “So you’re that Xingese prince the kid keeps mentioning, eh?”

“Aw,” Ling says like he doesn’t know, like he hasn’t heard how Edward will name drop his existence sending his shared heart, twin life-sources laid down in the same place, lurching and yearning at once in a belly burning way. “Ed talks about me. That’s sweet of him.”  

Heinkel snorts, either because it’s a funny thought—Edward, lips pulled back in a show of teeth and snarls: sweet—or because it’s so achingly true, the way dirt and grim covers the exterior of a worried set of golden eyes wide as twin suns, that rack along gentle searching for scrapes and bites. A childhood habit on rote, stemming from the seedling of brotherhood, more fiercely loving than anything Ling had ever seen when he’d seen after meeting how Edward’s sole focus was the inventory of insipid nicks salient against hollow armored body.

“So are you really a prince or was he just fucking ‘round with us?” Heinkel asks, puffing a cloud of white air.

Ling easily nods in the simple territory. “Yes, I am. The twelfth son of the emperor.”

Heinkel whistles through his teeth, either a heavy sigh or soft heave, maybe just exhaustion of this sort of abnormality wearing on him. “What? Twelfth?”

“There are forty-one other suitors as well. Xing has many clans, and from each a suitable spouse chosen then is sent to the emperor and a child born as a heir with a claim to the throne. So I have a big family not really on the best of terms,” Ling says simply. Ignoring the details drenched in tells of gore, of the vengeance and rivalries. The killings and assassins sent. Ignoring how terrified he was unless there worked Lan Fan standing steady at his right and Fu hobbling at his left until the age of nine, only eased by them continuing guardianship from silent stalks of rowed windows and rooftops when he learned how the subtly and smiling approached worked better than a constant knightship at his shoulders.

“Family dinners at your place must be one hell of a time.” Heinkel shakes his head, forefinger and thumbing fixing his glasses straight, adds: “I swear to god that kid makes the weirdest friends.”

“I don’t think Ed had many friends besides his brother to begin with actually, so any is an impressive improvement,” Lings says.

“Of course,” he grunts, resigned. “And you’re really possessed by some immortal sin, right?”

Ling hums idly. “From what Greed remembers about his old self, I think he used to have one of his friends lob his head off from his shoulders with a hammer to prove the fact he was actually an unkillable artificial human being.” He tilts his head, slightly, black unbrushed tangles obscuring claws of outstretched shadows in long lines across his face. “Ed would probably be very willing to lob my head off with his automail, but I would rather you just take my word for it instead.”

“So,” says Heinkel, slightly unhinged as seems to be his permanent state as of late, “how did, y’know, that….happen?”

“I came to this country after immortality to become an emperor when an evil man in a white robe that looks exceptionally like Ed’s father apparently, and lives in a non-existent basement underneath this country’s capital thought I was a good enough vessel for his son, the literal embodiment of greed, after I was eaten by another one of his sons and used a different son of his life force to escape from the belly of the other son along with Ed and said son,” Ling says.

A vein on Heinkel’s folded forehead pulses with what seems to be immense withdrawal, fully and totally surrendering himself to this. And. Well. Life can be like that, sometimes. A breath inhaled sharply from his nose. “You’re shitting me.”

“Whether or not it’s true doesn’t really matter.” Ling shrugs. “But I accepted the eternal life Greed offers, untouchable beast and all. It’s the only way.”

“Damn,” he says. “I still don’t think it was the most well thought out plan to visit another country and get taken over by a demon.” And well, Ling does have to give it to him because Heinkel’s _trying_ to be a well-put adult in a situation brought to hell’s levels.

But that’s all he gives really. Ling says, “I can do whatever I want. Ed knows I’m a dumbass, so he doesn’t care,” which is a lie, and Greed stirs slightly at it before drifting deeper in the back burner of his self-mindedness. Edward had cared for the most part, a lot. (Sweet of him, Ling thinks again like a whisper, constant hum of hard fact and truth that won’t let him rest.)

His glance falls astray and sees his pretend lay of waste come and taken by an armored giant that handles him almost like a ragdoll and a brother bigger than life that grudgingly coins through a wallet of state funds. Clockwork hands lunge longingly, traversing with hands touching, feet marching through Dante’s Inferno. Hell made in image of human thought, then gone in a brilliant white that has always been a thing to take and take. Sees immortality. The forbidden fruit placed right there, between open teeth. Snarls and bites into it, furiously. Takes it as his—his want, his duty—thinking later that it makes sense he and Greed come to one another so well, there cut from the same cloth, the two of them, a perfect harmony amidst the feverish rhythm of tortured screams put right above his pounding heartbeat.

“Huh,” is all Heinkel says. “So, like...how much longer will you be around? Before Greed comes back. Think the kid would like a chance to talk to ya.”

“I’ll make sure I get a chance to catch Ed alone,” Ling assures which isn't’ really answer. “I have things to ask him about as well.”  

They jump and both turn, startled at: “Want to ask me ‘bout what, asshole?”

Edward plants himself with ever lacking of a soldier's grace, the line of his jaw defying all order that pillars up the military standing he’s grappled in. There’s four bags he white knuckles, one in his right and three in his left blushing pink where there’s nicks and chips in skin against the cold to balance himself even. He stands with the shot weariness tiredly drawing out something akin to distrust at the lit pathway of people around them of someone who just punched his way out of death again.

And he’s close enough to touch, Edward, standing there a few feet away painstakingly whole, shoulders drenched in the black toss-over jacket and a wrinkled flaps of the button up undone at the top, raised to hs full height like wildfire. Utterly beautiful. Something more than in ways that have Ling crossed for two types of yearning and mouth left dry. The dying sun spills off his sides like liquid gold, picking out his hair in yellow. It’s drenched him in the holy light preachers of his clan propagandized, wide-eyed and believing in winged men fallen to lands feet.  

Ling wants him like this, and in every other way Edward has come in. Holy, hero, savior, human, friend, brother. A treasure found and brought up into the light of earthen sun from the wayward side life were treasures are always mistakenly found. Marred by time’s wandering hands, untouchable to anyone else.

But, Ling finds himself (unsurprisingly) in thought of mapping the line of Edward’s back, pushing flat with the pad of his thumb and front of his lips the furrow that gets tense whenever stumped by a problem. Mouth carving paths and roads up his throat. Searching desert borne skin for something more than the thing of immortality.

Bled into every aspect, he’s always been avaricious brought up to a point of twin breaths in the same mouth, two sides of the same coin in the being of his soul among the thousands, synonyms of _want_. Edward’s hands placed either side of his hips, Edward’s hair spilled around alight like a halo of flame, Edward’s lips moving so slowly burning him and turning his leg weak, Edward, Edward, Edward—

Well. He wants, a lot.

Ling’s heart gives a hungry tremor for a sort of starvation he’s not felt before. For a moment he lets his gaze fall down the length of Edward entirety, finally saying with eyes averted back again, “So I guess this is your disguise? Wear actual nice clothes for a change and your hair down so no one can tell the difference?”

Edward blinks. Eyes crystallized with golden surprise, almost opening and mouthing softly what he thinks is _Ling?_ (but then again he might just be a delusional, possessed fool that trips over his heart at all the wrong times), rolling his eyes and bites back a scoff in his mouth. “Oh go and announce it to the rest of the world, will ya? If you yell it any louder and the MPs ‘round here will hear you, dumbass.”

“Aw, come on Ed,” Ling says, so very gleefully. “Just call you short, and you’ll have gone and done it yourself.”

A loud clink causes Ling to wince, not envious on the status of Edward’s jaw aches—no matter how lovely it his, curved and scuplted where it used to round, a gentle gene and trained beauty in the turned eyes of beholders everywhere—and he wonders about the marvel it hasn’t just fallen off in protest to the grinding of frustration chewed out between crushing molars. A permanent snarl etched hasty and messy, like the masks dawned by children from their own making of imaginative beasts and demons during the listing poll of festivals in Xing.  

Like now. Edward’s lips are pulled back displaying canines, trying obviously very hard to _not_ make a scene and prove in pointed confirmation Ling’s exact point. So red faced there might be steam blowing from out his ears.

“Wanna call me short? I’ll break off your fucking nipples off you dumb, immoral, immortal, scheniving son of a bitch,” he hisses—non-threateningly in the slightest, if you ask Ling.

“Adorable. How long have you been reaching for that one?” Ling smirks, unable to help himself.

Edward glowers, dangerously. “I’m going to murder you with _a brick,_ Ling Yao.”

“Oh?” says Ling.

Edward hisses, “ _A brick_.”

Heinkel coughs, a little too empathetically, letting his eyes travel between a few suspicious, terse seconds before twisting away. “I’m gonna go find Darius. Then we can head out. Don’t do anything crazy while I’m gone.”

Edward snorts, “Like what? Become fugitives? Get possessed?” and Ling quashes the stinging urge to hysterically laugh gnawing on his lower lip hard because Heinkel just gives them another tired once over and heaving lament before departing, tearing a place on the quiet bustle of the market street. They watch him become a blurred speck for a moment longer.

“So are you sure we’ll be able to avoid attracting detection while just wearing something actually white for once in your life and you’re hair up differently?” Ling finally says to ward away the silence stretching between them like a strand of honey pulling.

“Just for this town at least,” he agrees. “After we leave here we’re going to be camping around trying to stay away from any sort of civilizations for awhile. Stick to the forest and stuff. At least, until we need more supplies.” Edward digs around in a store-sold paper brown bag, movements jerky with cold. Then in front of his face he twists a vial between fingertips, liquid sloshing up to brush hands along the rim. “For when we need to go in again I bought some hair dye. I could shave off my eyebrows if I really, really wanted no one to recognize me, but anyways…”

And Ling tries for a terrifying moment to imagine that. Visibly, despite the warmth of the souls in thousands, he shivers full bodily. “Please Ed I’m begging you to never shave your eyebrows.”

He snorts, shaking the bottle as he pockets it again. “Yeah, wasn’t planning too. That’s why I bought the dye.”

“Of course…” Ling wearies.

“Don’t look at me like that dumbass. I was never gonna _actually_ shave my eyebrows. Y’all are crazy for assuming I’m _that_ reckless,” Edward sniffs dejectedly.

“No we’re not,” Ling says. “You are that reckless. Our worry is completely, one-hundred percent justified.”

Edward sharpens a look of betrayal under his round eyes scrunching up charmingly. Seemingly ever thoughtful. “So what happened to demon dickhead up there?” he asks, tapping a single forefinger twice to his forehead’s bridge.

“Asleep,” Ling says. “He doesn’t need it often, used to not have to sleep at all in his old body I think. But alas I am human.” He shrugs good-naturally that lifts awkward still. “So sometimes he leaves and I’m here. Not for very long though.”

His eyes—Ling thinks—are no little of strong hold, furiously gripped on a spot of his face cornering his eyes but not looking, at the canthus then over left some. They dart away, golden orbs like fish startled in pond water distanced further now.

He says, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Ling clears his throat clumsily. He’s not used to this, the ambling around and toppling over his own feet forced into gracefulness, unable to adapt in this new grounding, useless as animal tail on land or paws in oceans. This is all still new, the friendship and genuine care. The want at conflict with the undeserving inbetween. The sweetness of it all honeyed yellow. “So how much money do we have left?”

“Not nearly enough as I would like unfortunately,” Edward sighs, letting his expression slump. “I wasn’t really planning for an undetermined amount of time out of society when we all fucked off to the woods. And even though we can hunt and be shielded well enough there and staying by towns is risky, I prefer to be near in case something, y’know, happens. So when Mr. Gorilla gets back from the butcher shop we’d still probably only have enough to grab only a few supplies from when we finally stop at another town….unless….”

“Unless?” Ling cautions.

“I may have an idea that can make all our problems go away,” Edward says, shifting his carrying weight, sharing with him a delighted look that can only mean terrible, terrible things.

Ling frowns slightly. “I highly doubt that.”

“Oh shaddup and trust me, idiot prince,” Edward scoffs, rolling his eyes, saying, “Look, if I use my state alchemist title to filter out a little bit more money from the back, that would attract the government's attention off from us just a little. We’ll be able to slip away again, easy.”

Ling looks at this, drinks it in, says deadpan, “This is going to be one of those moments where I tell you something’s not a good idea and you ignore me, isn’t it?”

“You’re learning Ling.” Edward nods solemnly. “Slowly, but you’re learning.”

“That doesn’t change how seriously _not_ good of an idea this,” Ling says.

Edward argues, “We need money, we need the MPs off our asses. It’s win-win.”

“You’re so reckless Ed,” says Ling, “This is why we thought you’d shave off your eyebrows.”

“That was just an expression!” Edward cries.

“Huh? The most shit expression I’ve ever heard,” Ling sniffs, poised and nose pointing up delicately, disdainful. “Your Amestrian sayings are awfully strange.”

Brow digging for a moment, contemplating, then Edward’s nodding along his mediation. “Well not really a saying tied to Amestris, but not wrong. I don’t get them half the time, but people like ‘em and shit. So.” He shrugs.

“ _Ed_ ,” Ling says.

Edward huffs, saying, “Calm down and chill out. I’ve got this. _Trust me_ , and it won’t totally backfire,” and walking off to do something Ling has no absolute faith in. His retreating figure basked in a backwash of candle fire yellow.

 _I’m screwed_ , he thinks as he follows Edward into hell and steps laying past in wait and tries not to think about the metaphor twisted in there too much. A moment, the time it takes him half a step to stumble, he lets himself be thankful that Greed _isn’t_ awake because he’s a jerk and would most definitely be laughing to counter his own chagrin, as does a jerk.

He’s moving before envisages that, strong strides (especially for one for short) taking them to a pointed coordinate plane dot marked as a stepping stone to a bound mission objective. The employee tagged with silver metal engravings and swathed in cushioned military blue, blinks slow, then gets in shaky hands her orders sorted passing over money and information in payment to the minute flash of their country’s carved out emblem dented all over and clasp worked dull and rusted chained to hook at a shock of gold in the cold palette of the north. They both notice it immediately after, the cautious-footed personnel weapon ready, how their eyes roll and lock with one another’s. It’s that, that rises lump rises in Ling’s throat which he stubborns works back down.

Only at the railway depot and the mentally marked third weary side-eye, does Ling say, “What are you doing now?”

“Uh, buying train tickets?” says Edward and doesn’t look at him. Not fully engrossed, but simply avoiding.  

It takes him a moment, but, eventually his eyebrows run to his hairline. “Oh my god,” Ling says as realization rushes in strides. And then, Ling really understands. Facts curl from his unwound fingers that were pinching his palm.  

“Glad to see you’re caught up with the rest of the class,” Edward snarks, but his mind still racing with minute observations, soul stirring, absolutely hating how thrown off he is by the placement of pleasure there in Edward’s voice, makes himself a statue with resolve.

He’s so much more manipulative, than Ling originally thought.

And he tries to make it habit, situational to conditioned hardened and honed with experience and the ever off-chance never to underestimate enemy or allie alike because that’s how he knew the twenty-sixth son was slain with like a sharpened scythe. Ling hadn’t, originally, knew the two brother’s of hero tales and farmers folk-lore had to be some book-smart (as of alchemy’s calling) other brash and brawling (as they were still alive) but thought that dried up a the tips of their talent. But Edward, as oblivious as he could come to and emotionally a ghost, was _manipulative_.

He was open as a book and denser than mercury with the spectrum as a whole of human faces; but from that was a twisted trustworthy facade, a constructed face pulled dull all poker made, a sharpened sense bred to catch the shifting stances, the clenching and unclenching of fist and nails. Motives just patterns, people turned puzzles.

Because misdirection is a tactic pervaded by magicians, an ornate manipulator. Send the dogs chasing after the tell-tale of a thrown bone, too late seeing the cats have darted off with agile slips and blunders under the cracks and throwaway corners of places no one gazes to in obvious search. Too preoccupied by the fact in front of them to see wide enough. The dogs their military; the train their bone; the escape there’s in sight.   

“Well make sure you buy one for a trip Central as well,” Ling finally says, peering over right shoulder blade with no difficulty. Elation and something adrenaline crushing from the appraising of Edward notes how _easy_ it would be, to tuck his chin in the strands of spun gold, curl arms around the salving cold clinging to his form, finds how _badly_ he finds he wants it along with everything else, so he immediately quashes them with vigor.

“Yeah, yeah,” agrees Edward, pointed-edge grin pulled toothily from each check. He lines a right hand fist toward him, and Ling takes a moment before reeling out his own knocking knuckles together. “Good idea. It’ll be a message, let Father and the rest of this fucking family know we’re comin’ for ‘em.”

He shouldn’t be this far gone.

And yet—

Edward twists, a little at the neck, and pins him with a look of lips lifting on half of one side of his mouth a smile still blinding through the small crack.

 

**_________**

 

They hold the fact that military personnel had grazed a chase after them through the alleyway organ system to the yawning mouth of dark undergrowth and pine of the town over Ling and Edward’s head for the next three weeks.

But still, Heinkel and Darius relent because there was whispered word through the gutter underbelly of forest fingers scraping dangerously close to outskirts of townside coops that suspects in resemblance to the criminally wanted Fullmetal Alchemist and Co. had been comprised fleeing on a train to Central City. Officials were still looking into it, they said, but Ling heard clear as day Edward’s quick minded distraction had worked, if for the time being.

It’s not peace, but it’s the closest thing since banding together.

So of course, Edward comes, saying: “So you really don’t remember a thing?” running the moment spot of quiet Greed used as a canvas to escape, from stolen time.

Ling startles; Greed falls out his tree touching down bodily for a landing. He rockets back to his feet, steady and pointedly ignorant to the momentary lapse.

Edward stands there when just a second ago, Greed thought, he’d been flanked by Darius’ insistence in checking the rabbit traps by one another. His eyes flit lazy and careful to the sky’s roof, specs of light unblinking in the washed out night. Universal blue and purple taking care to devour the remains of the last of the warm hues touching horizon close. Ah. Well that explains it.

“The fuck you talkin’ ‘bout, kid?” he grunts, mulish.

“The Greed before you that lived in Dublith,” Edward says, despite them both knowing exactly what he meant before. “Do you actually not remember any of it?”  

Because late nights loosen all tongues, darkness not as folding as the daytime boughts and Edward is always curious and pressing with an insistent want to rivals Greed, he just shrugs, saying noncommittally: “Meh. Just things. Faces, sorta. I guess.”

“Do you remember when you kidnapped Al?” Edward asks. Pressing. There’s something panicked in his eyes, captures wildfire.

“Wow, I managed to get the jump on _that_?” An eyebrow arcs up appreciatively, and Greed whistles. “Well damn, dead me had some moves then if he managed that feat.”

“Asshole,” Edward hisses. “Anyway, you also said you didn’t lie. So what the hell were you doing when you claimed Ling wasn’t there back under Central?”

“Well technically I didn’t lie since I had no clue the kid was still in here,” he says, knocking on the crown of their head point and center. “I mean, I was a good eighty percent sure he had been absorbed into the vortex of souls swirlin’ inside me and ya’know. Died. Sorta. But that was wrong. Obviously ‘cause he’s still kickin’.”

“Obviously,” cautions Edward.

It looks like there’s more bleeding from the tip of his tongue, like scholars always are the ones searching and searching in dug earth a little to deep at six feet, so Greed grins all knife-like, saying: “If that’s all you want pipsqueak then I’m gonna dash. There’s a cabin I hear up ahead so I plan on bothering ‘em for a bit of their coin, steal a pillow—daddy dearest knows my back needs it—eat an actual meal for once.” He shrugs, eloping in strides, chest still centered towards the alchemist. “You know.”

Edward blinks, startled. Pulls himself together and voices, “That’s an awful idea. You’re going to get remembered and seen. Then we get caught, ‘cause you’re—” his hand circles, meaningfully, in a received manner— “like that.”

“I’m harmless,” Greed says.  

“You kidnapped my little brother, dickhead,” protests Edward, one step forward unable to make up for the five.

“Dead me!” Greed corrects, and turns on his foot. “Night, tiny!”

 

**_________**

 

There’s a coming too, an orbit of the possession and the control and the mind in between.

A lead way of the ebb and flow that pertains to an unworded agreement. Greed in both his nature and nurture is flames with a wildfire hunger to take until there’s ruin and then rebirth and then repeat, and so is Ling but in a different calidity. Less wildfire and more candle flame that eats wax and stars table top desks.

Greed let’s himself sprawl in moonlit trees, stubbornly feline under the white bask, taking up the bulk of their thoughts, to which he then promptly falls asleep. When Ling gets those nights, he’d always hesitate with a hand paused mid-air, uncertain as a baby bird's wings, before landing back to ground with a solid thump a little too near to where Edward slept.

Company would be nice—he wanted it, with dreamy preoccupation and as a constant itch that never let him sit right alone—but they’ve all sacrificed enough so Ling refuses to let himself ask them hand over hours of rare rest. Forces through the graveyard shift, watching peaceful faces with chest amidst a rise and fall. Like a ghost haunting from a past life, the semblance breath taking almost as he cracks his back against the tree’s bark and peers under the lids of his eyes.

Darius shifts, Heinkel snores, and sometimes they both thrash a bit before settling stiffer than before. On the opposite end of the camp, in the depth of most nights it starts with teeth clenched with a gasp tight between his jaw for Edward, then his shoulder blades fluttering, tense, and behind the caps of his eyes, pupils dart around wildly in futile search for someone not there. There’s too many guesses left that match that eight letter fill-in of who.

For some reason, those nights, with leonine grace he rolls his weight to his feet's soles, mindful of the center of balance in the back of his mind like second nature and waits still in form for the thick blanket of quiet, then softly pads over with pale steps. Bends down in a lean crouch, and at the quicker pace of breath Ling reaches, palms up and lips twitching low. As if taming a feral beast, he’s careful not to move at first. A hand pressed inert in the metallic gold mane, soft to touch. When the waters calm again, and Ling deems it safe again, he runs his hand back, then forward again, in a even kept line. Over and over and over.

Edward’s hair is sweaty and greasy and tied back at this point with more dirt that rubber band, but, as Ling finds out, the flaming curl that warms inside him with pulsing want, the gentle slice of moment he’s carved stubbornly as his, is nice. He’s never got to be soft like this before.

Remembers how, once, Edward pushed past consciousness and clumsily squinted, all the ragged breaths gone hoarse. Could feel the energy signature, reading it easily as his first language learned, and thinks: desert runs deep in him, crystal clear in every ruin and edge. The sun a poor forgery of the golden boy.

Fu’s face, his recollection near perfection to the tracing scar that curled fang-like around his bicep to the stretch of skin that folded in near scowl. “The Western Sage,” he’d said, “is our culture’s closest thing to a perfect being. They claimed him to be a man built from the gold of the gods, a statue so beautiful they brought him to life and our people found him strewn about and wasting away in the dunes. He brought to us a new power that starts within the life of the earth, the Dragon’s Pulse.” Looks him over gruff, keen in the patience silence that bites at Ling to point out how he’s heard this bedtime story a million times before but not wanting to submit to disrespect and another sixty punishment push-ups. “And you will master this power if you want to live and claim your rightful throne.”

Golden eyes are a rarity in Xing, usually the most beautiful and families highest in riches chalked up to good graces with those same gods that made the Western Sage. But those are washed and watered down with each lineage, second hand—and never, has Ling ever seen any a pair so bright as Edward’s.

They’re civet and alert, empiricism and instinct working hand in hand to tandem harmony. Changing by the minute, no sixth sense picking up habit danger and still not fully awake because Edward doesn’t comment on the hand running through his hair, instead pressing closer maybe, so barely that Ling thinks he might have imagined it. “Al,” he sobs, cotton stuffing dulling his brain, and remnants of sleep still snug in his mouth. “Nina. You’re not—’m sorry, I don’t wanna go back. ‘m sorry, ‘m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Ed,” Ling tells him because he doesn’t know if there’s anything better.

“‘m sorry, sorry, sorry, ‘m sorry,” he says again and again and again. “I can’t go back, sorry, please.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Ling says, grasping for straws. Urges with a careful brush, “Stay here and sleep.”

It works, shockingly, as Edward sighs letting Ling guide him to deeper sleep and everything feels exponentially lighter.

No longer like he’s water through riverbends with muddy banks with currents and vacuums sweeping up his legs and knocking them down a few. Like he’s lost in the middle of an ocean, frantic and pulsing and unsure what to do with no clear view in sight. It’s still there, that unstitched trepidation. Only, now, the feelings no as sinking as if salt water choking up his lungs.

Mildly, while still at the petting, his thoughts drift dryly, wondering if this is how it was for Alphonse and then worse some more. He doesn’t let himself consider it most nights, flanking those thoughts with static silence or baseless ideas with a little less point.

He doesn’t cry, with eager tears still both warm and wet to the corners of his eyes. He does, though, let himself breath. Stops swallowing at the lump bubbling up his throat. Gives into the reprieve, the rest.

But he’s always in the tree again, back against a wall and cowardly hovering, by break of dawn.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Greed will always grit out empathetically when the sun finally cracks the stretch of land open, reaching up sky-bound and yawning hugely as Ling shoves the fleeting and few scatterbrain leftovers of those moments as deep away as he can before Greed can catch sight. “ _God_. I feel like shit. Did I drink or something last night? ‘Cause it sure feels like I drank something last night.”

 _You barely touched anything last night_ , Ling says remembering a fireside catch of hogtied rabbits and drained river water clear as mud. _Therefore I can confirm you had no alcohol. And also, you certainly don’t get to talk about waking up feeling as if you’ve got a hangover. All your wounds are superficial. Shouldn’t the Philosopher's Stone just fix the headache?_

“Fuck if I know,” Greed says. “In theory I suppose. I haven’t been able to get my hands on anything good since Goldilocks and the two brutes shucked us into the life of a castaway.”

 _Ah, how sad,_ Ling hums mildly in that tone completely devoid of meaningful sympathy just to tip his over edge a little more, _you know there was actually a bar in each of the villages we’ve stopped by so far, right?_

For a moment Greed whirls on no one, trying to level a glare at a voice and soul embodied in the one. Finally, he settles, huffing and crossing his arms in perpetual childlike nature, saying: “Fuck off. I’ll just be sure to go to get enough in the next place. Not like I can do much else in this shit show forest.”

 _Don’t be too harsh on it_ , says Ling. _There are worse places to be._

 _“_ Yeah?” Greed grunts.

Ling thinks of desolate ruins painted in the same red that all life shares drank greedy in hungry sea-large mouthfuls, full of it; cavernous eternity crafted into the etchings of walls and tall roofs. Devoured flames. Mass graves. His ache screaming for relief, any and all contact just another fire of pain running right under his skin. Decay filling his nostrils with every footfall another grave stepped into. Hell’s inferno. Damnation.

How through it all, he felt gritting into his skin, grafting along his arms and legs, that same desire gnawing a hole bigger into the center of the monster’s stale being. Remembers how similar it brushes along flesh with his own immortality. Starvation never satisfied, jealousy unmoveable, exhaustion carried as a born in weight, wants unattainable. The smoke and flame plumed largely leaving him colorless, empty, faded, desperate for better hearth and security.

Greed irks under both skins, second layer, snake like.  

“I can’t believe my brother fucking vored you,” he says, pushing off the lumber. His knees like jelly.

 _I want to get a exorcism_ , Ling thinks back immediately.

“Aw, c’mon,” says Greed, lips upturned, cruelly toothed. “Don’t be like that.”

 _Preferable now. Please,_ Ling says. Then adds: _If you continue this train of conversation Greed I swear I’m going to take over this body once more and cut my tongue from my mouth._

“My body,” Greed says, with defense. “My tongue, my mouth.”

 _Ours_ , Ling amends and can feel with surge of protest that trips their heartbeat. Irking through in in millisecond inches flooding down on him with the break of a wave against bare shores with a fury burned fire not belonging to him. _The others will be waking up. Darius and Heinkel should be able to find us food on the rode, but as they said last night we’ve been at risk staying for so long and so close along the village outskirts. Those times you and Darius had to sneak in too for both supplies and information just make us all the more suspicious._

“We’re fine,” Greed says, sniffing decisively. “Besides if anyone does find us I’ll just stick one of my minions on them to take care of things.”

“You know, a better plan than that is avoidance and caution,” Darius says, fisting the straps of a bag large and heavy.

“You,” Greed says, skimming eyes up. “You’re wearing a backpack.”

Darius snorts, disgruntled. He hitches his higher. “Brilliant observation. Time to get going, we’ve leaving.”

“I’m the leader,” Greed insists, but he’s already tailing after Darius’s retreating figure going glowing in the morning wake with that of a puppy’s attention the same in likeness when put up in a Venn Diagram. “I get to say when we’re leaving.”

A glance. “And?”

“We’re leaving.” Greed nods decisively, proud in it’s revel. Snagged on the sight of blonde, he shouts: “Come on minions pack it up! Time to go!”

Edward bares his teeth wolfishly, moon crescent stamps of purple hanging a lighter more lavender shade under his eyes and Heinkel just defeats with a sigh sagging his shoulders lower. They both look tenderly unkempt, as if played in a tussle then put themselves back to some standing order where the bar is set low, and fist into the straps of two fitted backpacks.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Edward says, tiredly.

“No fighting the both of you.” Heinkel pinches the bridge of his nose, where his glasses slip, slip, lower and lower. “Just walk.”

Huffing with cheeks blown up and pufferfish-like, Edward holds himself reluctant in all accounts but stomps away with angry heel to toe steps. Following, Heinkel shakes his head far enough behind. Ling’s heart stops—then beats in a vigorous saccato.

He seems better, he thinks warily with eyes only for the cross-stitch of Edward’s poorly pulled together attitude and well being. Maybe. It’s not in his genetic make-up, to be healed complete. But. Maybe, Ling thinks.

“ _Idiot_ ,” Greed whispers, darkly.

Heinkel’s ear twitches. “What was that?”

“Avoidance and caution,” Greed picks up with loudly.

“Huh?” Darius grunts.

“How is that a better plan that fisticuffs?” Greed goes on, tipping right then back to left again with arms feathered out on each side like wings, ready for take off, carefully walking with tightrope precision. “Subdue the enemy, get them out of the way and there’s no problem for the rest of the way.”

“Unless the enemy has backup. Then what are you going to do, keep at it ‘till you drop?” says Darius with barely-contained thrumming frustration, that just comes out tired, almost disbelieving he’s humored this with more effort than a scoff. Not putting to use his own plan of avoidance and caution.

“Yes,” seriously says Greed. “That’s the idea.”

“And that idea all depends on how powerful you freaks are. Stamina, basic strength, stuff like that,” Darius waves him away.

“So if I punched myself and get knocked out am I strong or I am weak?” asks Greed.

“Strong,” Heinkel says from up front.

“Weak,” says Darius.

“An idiot is what you are,” corrects Edward finally joining in, sagely, blinking blearily sleep from the corners of his eyes. They focus, narrowing sharply with judgement in on the collar high black button-up and black jacket stiff arms flexing with minute movements, unlike Edward’s drowning limbs in swaddled fabric, fingertips barely grazing the sleeves yawning cut. “Especially wearing that.”

“Kid you’re a twink having a midlife crisis and a tragic backstory,” Greed says. “I ain’t trusting your fashion sense.”

Edward keels over sputtering furiously. “You wore a fucking fur vest the first time I met you!”

“Don’t remember,” Greed says honestly. “Didn’t happen. But a fur vest you said? That does actually sound pretty cool…”

“For an immortal you sure got the same horrible taste in clothes as a teenager,” Darius grunts, pointedly, turning his eyes low and accusing. Edward huffs.

“Can it, monkey. Y'all have bad taste is faces,” he mumbles in a near miss hiss.

“Look kid, face it. The red just doesn’t go,” Greed consoles.

“You specifically cannot talk to me on this subject,” Edward puts out, blunt.

Hands lifted placatingly, Greed drawls a few steps higher, going, “Hey now. I know we don’t see eye to eye on some things—”

“If you say it’s because I’m too short I swear to god Greed I will eradicate you by every fucking cell of your body so slowly and painfully you’ll wish you had fucked back off to Central’s basement to daddy.”

“—because you’re too short,” he finishes.  

Edward’s jaw pulses with what seems to be a minute of aching restraint. Then, he snaps, with all the kinetic force stored up in a rubber band bouncing back then at a turbulent speed towards Greed. Ling’s cackling, gone gaspy and breathless, because _fuck_ for all he subtracts in height Edward adds more and then some in pure petulance so much it hurts.

Claws and knees alike topple up Greed like some tree to climb, crossing his legs over Greed’s stomach and winding cold automail around the neckline base.

“Back!” Greed shrieks, stumbling. “Back, Goldilocks, back! My chimeras help me!”  

Armed and dangerous in pettiness and overcompensation with an additional fistful of water washed, graying stones, Edward shouts, hooked on dangerous to the footholds of Greed’s back, “Get over here so I can force feed you this fucking rock Greed!”

“I wouldn’t! That could be your brother’s cousin for all you know!”

“I’m going to stuff you full ‘till you can’t fucking move!”

“Both you brats quit it!” Darius says; jostling Greed back by his overly large collar with one hand, and the tail of Edward’s swaying braid effectively, like a car skirting to a stop, snatched in the other.

“I’m the oldest so I’m in charge here,” says Heinkel, from over in his half of the forest space ten paces safely at a distance. “So I’m saying no eating rocks.”

“Actually, I’m in charge,” says Greed, “in case any of you have forgotten.”

Heinkel barely glances at him, blunt. “No, I remember. I just don’t care. The two of you: behave. We’re too close to some farm land to you both to be yapping like this.”

Greed sputters, flailing uselessly for a moment as he spills out of Darius’s grasp gone limp with the left excess of anger sapped away, shoulders slumped with Edward’s gruff weight.

“You know, before I met you I wasn’t religious. Now I believe in hell. I live it every day you’re around,” Darius comments mildly from his area of space.

Greed opens his mouth for another wave of fury to tryst with the rest of them, crashing a breaking before even crossing any shore. A bark sings out over the poorly settled peacemaking, traveling purposefully with a warning note attacked, origin landing some place much closer than comfortable. They freeze.

Another, right after, sounds in a loud clamor.

With sight zoning in with a narrowed line of accurate precision, Greed collects himself first, keen eyes not missing a thing, letting Edward spill from his back concedingly and once again towering back at full height. “There’s a furry pet running for us a few yards away.”

“Shit, shit, shit! It’s the farm dog!” Edward hisses, loud jolting back to himself. His head revolves spastically for a second before he forces it back on track. “Lion King and Mr. Gorilla, try talking to it or something to get it to leave!”

“Just because we are part animal does mean we’re able to talk to other animals, dumbass,” Darius groans empathetically. Edward curses again.

“Oh,” Greed continues, listlessly, “it’s bringing the fluffy, walking clouds towards us now.”

“Those are _sheep_ you _idiot_ ,” Edward all but yells. His hands twitch closer. “ _Shit_.”

“Minions!” Greed barks. “One of you do something.”

“What the hell do you think we can go against a dog and sheep? Eat them?” Darius demands.

“Sheep taste awful,” Heinkel adds.

 _I’d be willing to give it a chance_ , Ling thinks the same time Edward spits out, “How do you _know_ that?”

Greed ignores them both. “Well what else are we supposed to do? Listen to the kid’s idea and ask them to scram nicely?”

“Wait,” Edward says, “I’m a genius.”

“You are?” they echo in tandem.

 _He is_? Ling whispers to only Greed.

“No, no. All of you shut up and hide in a tree,” he says, pawing them away. “I’ve got an idea that’s got a forty percent chance of actually working so I need y’all out of my way.”

Darius side-eyes him, oncely. “What are you going to do?”

“What I was raised to,” says Edward, smiling cryptic. “Now _hurry_.”

“Hurrying,” Darius mutters next to Greed, widely embracing the center of the tree’s stemming, but it takes him a few tries before he’s gracelessly clambered up that trail, Greed nimbly following with long elegance trained in Ling’s legs, both proffering down upward held palms to Heinkel’s grasp, grappling him higher using the strain of their forearm to shoulder joint with the rest of them fit snug in the tree, nested together like baby birds huddled near with the fear of flight still settled in their warmth and newborn ineptitude.

Pattering footsteps of a pack draw nearer, and Edward plants himself firmly in the enriched soil digging his grave another few feet to boot, his profile turned away but Ling can still see the way he eases into this position, acknowledges the calm. The collected savagery that skims his figure.

Ling glimpses him with the same thrum of confusion as to Greed’s it’s almost the same indistinguishable, alien emotion. _What’s he planning?_

“No idea, quit yapping,” Greed murmurs.

“What?” Heinkel says.  

“Shut up,” says Greed as the chalky and coal nose and coat come pushing through foliage just in spotting sight, doggish in legs and lean stance in the waay the mutt holds itself in a job. Flocking around, the snowy sheep follow. A noticeable storm, perfect camouflage naturally mastered ironically that wouldn’t have been notice if they were anything less than normal, Ling thinks. It’s only a matter one time, until the dog raises alarms and people come to hollow out the problem.

Maybe—despite all preference and what little bits of what’s perhaps leftover dignity not yet tosses with the rest of it the moment they all ran to the woods with tails between their legs—they should have just eaten the damn farm animals. Ling’s had lamb stew before, carted by cheap attraction stands for a _Taste of Cultural Difference!_ , but then Edward’s flashing one of his tree genuine grins (the smirk one, and wow, it’s embarrassingly telling what this means for Ling, something to be dissected and taken in little bits until he becomes immune the same way you deface poison to fix problems prefix) giving a sharp whistle around two of his fingers, yelling with infliction of military command: “Lie down!”

Immediate, the dog drops stomach down and sheep bah, floating now, useless.

“Walk on!” and snout first the dog swivels on forelegs and a leap, darting arrowhead towards the sheep with newfound purpose heavy in its hind legs, the way ears fold back preening. Runs circles around the sheep forcing them into clumped triples and driving them to spill out the leak where they came. “Come bye!” Edward says, and clockwise the dog goes flying. There’s dark streaks almost tire tracks left behind in its stead, a dark mark against pristine canvas white, the sheep impassively giving slow, even blinks.

When the last tuff brushes past a low hung lead, Heinkel whistles appreciatively. “Well that’s one way to do it, kid. Should’ve seen it coming.”

 _Alchemy of some kind_? Ling queries, squinting curiously.

“What kind of bullshit…” Greed gapes—and there’s something settled inside him that almost is a vault empty to see the creatures gone so soon. Reflexive memory brittle and startled warily a want of all them to come and follow, if Edward could truly manipulate them with ease and expressions of alchemy crackles fizzing beneath his fingertips.

Edward snorts. “I’m from fucking Resembol,” he pronounces, with pride as an undertone, “and in Resembol _everyone_ knows how to herd sheep.”

 

**_________**

 

“Hey what about that rumor where that commanding officer of yours was actually your dad?” Darius asks, around a spoon of canned peaches.

“What the fuck!” Edward squawks, ruffled, ragged, and puffing out bird-like with injured pride nursed carefully across his face. “That’s complete bullshit, the Colonel is a bastard bred from the worst kind. Where did you even come up with that?”

“There’s lots of rumors surrounding the Fullmetal Alchemist,” Darius glances him over. “You aren’t exactly...subtle.”

Silence settles with the same opacity of starlight, night filtering back in through spoonfed regiments.

Heinkel chimes: “Is it true that you’re actually a government experiment and that there’s an entire legion of Fullmetal Alchemists stashed away for the war effort?”

 

**_________**

 

“Oh,” says a sweetly sugared old lady, flyaways piled high in a single bun with an assortment of crystal pink and yellow hair clips with messy organization and precise craft that it could have only been done by child hand, “is that little child your’s?”

“Well,” Heinkel returns, even as he can. “Yes.” At his left, Edward fumes with all that of a volcano forced into dormancy, fingers pinching the ends of his hair rain-messed and wind blown.

“How lovely,” cooes the lady. “You must make a wonderful father.”

Behind them, commotion rises like heated air under it all the calm cool running through as the bank doors flipped open and close with every visitation, the window at the farest end and then once over to the right missing it’s security ensured glass pane, carved shakily out with what must have been a dagger of claw or some kind, the wall etchings adding transmutation marks. Nothing amiss, yet, but robbing a bank has never been an easy chore.

 

**_________**

 

“The first order of business directed by your one and only leader, me, as the dictator, king, prime minister, chancellor, and president—oh hold on, emperor too, you’re right, geesh sorry, pissant, don’t get your incorporeal soul in a twist there—is,” Greed says during Team Greed Union Meeting number one, “that I get _this_.” He thrusts up, by two gangly underarms slick and wet, an amphibian like cretin, bared with large googly eyes and a wide, open mouth.  

“No,” Heinkel says.

Greed nods insistently, serious. “ _Yes_.”

“It sorta looks like Envy’s true form if you look at it hard enough,” Edward calls out, feet away, and squawking indignantly that Ling’s come to find happens at any sort of interaction involving physically bearings, when Darius picks him up easily, with a grunt of: “Don’t get involved in dumb shit when your on firewood duty.”

After him, Greed shouts, “Don’t you dare compare Junior to that ugly ass, piece of shit that dresses like a palm tree!”

“You named him Junior?” Heinkel asks, with something almost impressed in his dull tone.

Greed turns back to him, brow grim. “Yes. My second in command needs a good name. Greed Avaricious Junior, but everyone just calls him Junior for short.”

Ling thinks, _Why not call him G.A.J. for short then instead?_

“The opinion count is per body so yours in invalid,” Greed says, continuing at the expense of knitted confusion that’s become a homely resident between Heinkel’s pinched expression, adding, “So we’re definitely keeping him ‘cause he’s my minion now.”

“Greed.” Heinkel’s sigh is heavy, and loaded. The weight of worlds. “Put the frog down.”

 

**_________**

 

Ling sits squat, static fire a crackling hymn and night bugs a spoken song, staring down the line of rabbit roasted on a spit. “You know when I was a little kid people said that I’d understand when I grew up, and I believed them.”

 _You’re being dramatic_ , Greed says.

“But look at me now,” Ling says, sweeping his arms widely.

The groan rumbles through them, full way. _Kid seriously quit it and just let me take control for this._

“A sorta fully grown adult and I understand nothing.”

“Uh,” Heinkel glances, glasses gone steamy with the smokey hazelwood heat. “The prince one….are you trying to swallow the rabbit while it’s on fire?”

“I’m stopping him now,” Greed says, power overbearing, hands quaking with it, jerking entire body and limb like omnipresent puppet strings. “No more forest fire threats, go back to your business minion.”

 

**_________**

 

There’s a furious rhythm staccato being played, his heart as the drumbeat he’s all but been accustomed to being toyed with when it comes to the ingrained recklessness that comes from an orphan’s leftover share in the form of Edward. Hunched over an launched up lunch, dinner, plus a breastbone. Vomit, blood.

He’s pale and crumbling for reasons Ling can’t grasp—maybe doesn’t want to, because that. That would make the heart hunger of staved off worry _worse_ —and Greed’s in control so their hands won’t shake.

“Humans are so weak,” Greed says with something like apathy, gaze leveled cold on that of Edward’s profile, retching. So, so pathetic, he thinks, anger an anchor they know.

“Weak or not we’ve kept him going to this long, so he doesn’t get to kick it now after all the grief he’s given us. Make sure he just stays like that so he doesn’t choke,” Heinkel tells him. “There’s no point in giving him food again. We’ll try to get him to drink a little bit of water later.”

 

**_________**

 

In this moment, Ling is taken by the overcapacity of remnant memories stolen from a dead man, all the while simultaneously boxed in by all fours of the forest, on knees turned to jelly and arms gone boneless.

The real him—the crumbs of him left, bits and pieces catching dust along the ornery hem of the jacket Greed swings around his mid-thighs—is fading in the foreground, is there in every presence that Greed takes to like snakeskin, and then gone, and gone, and gone. _And gone_ , Greed said, large in his moment with mountainous walls pillaring up, up behind, a watchful eye boardly rolled towards him by mock parenting, jealousy in the form of a dark green leviathan. Ling is all human. Ling is homunculus.

Ling is nothing.  

He sees the long, small, and snot faces of patchwork military escapees playing barmaid, and simultaneously, hears the here and there rustles of Darius and Heinkel in stolen bedsack, Edward’s shattering breaths.

There is an ocean, not made of blood, but the type that old sailors crossed and divided in the amongst of them, water slipping through the holes of his hands, fingers knitted, grip tight, like the one him and Lan Fan ran the lengths of royal garden fields across. _Take care in how you tempt things that feel no leash,_ Fu had said, as they rolled their pant legs to cuffs as high as their kneecaps, wading in back and forth. _The land might bind it, but tales of sea gods have made it to the land for a reason. Give it a reason and those waves might snatch your feet and never bother to return you back._

Chides were so visceral, so knee-jerk to be any sort of second thought, superstitions never something Fu dwelled on but he’d trailed the ghosts that choked Ling’s mouth, clammy and afraid and fake, and made a distance. It’d be tasked on him to protect, Young Lord and titles and hierarchy all settled on balanced shoulders but he still took with him the weight of Ling Yao along.

Gave him Lan Fan first as a friend, then as a guard. A guardian, a sword. His friend, first at the front lines of titles. Her skin ached, under all those layers of sun and short-shirt, but she bared through it with crossed arms self served as both shield and sword against the market glances of other doiled up girls, arched up her chest when called to stand, to protect with eyes on the line of fierce vulnerability.

 _You’re beautiful_ , Ling told her, smiling to the back of his molars, all teeth, and she’d still shy uncomfortably but it’d be the uncomfort that embarrasses her cheeks brightly, bending her neck under it’s appraisal. The same sort of red Edward gets to him when Ling flutters his lashes in direction of his arms; distress a synonym too, to when doctor’s orders says binding won’t to good for the after of impalement, when he hides under baggy shirts and coat tails and not much else.

Ling sees them with their broad skin backs to him, and thinks it isn’t the same, the conflict they have at with the bodies they wear. A study in structure. Feels the split of the two types of yearning, because he’s squirmed in his skin but never not fit, like some patchwork piece fraying in bad temper. Now it feels like he’s bursting, inside out. Souls just another word for the ghosts squeezing close his lungs, with no Fu, no Lan Fan to make them stop. They don’t fit, in the in between moments that they _can’t_.

 _Stop it_ , Ling sends hurtling forward with a bow tied, brute force headache. _Please, make it stop._

The grass is like silks beneath his grasp. Silks in the memories of him and Lan Fan and politics disguised in creamy colors; silks in the feeling of Martel’s hair greasy and slickest out of them all, compared to the grainy brush of Dolcetto’s pushed back, different from the taut of Roa’s spiked bangs.

“ _You_ stop it, brat.” Greed stumbles, spilling his weight against the steady ridge of wood, chipping flakes where he digs into. “Leave me _alone_.”   
_It’s my body,_ Ling howls, trying to keep his voice apace with the rising rivertides of mandated souls, screaming.

“Just _shut up already_ ,” says Greed, an ironclad grip going to his forehead, sparking to light in fireworks of red, cackling where the right fingernails push into a little to deep breaking malleable flesh. He feels the storm of anger like a hand around his neck, palpable and real rising up and up. A physical touch. “Could do without your fucking opinion on everything every damn second of the day.”

 _You need my opinion or we’d get nowhere working with the others,_ Ling says, gritting on something that dances dangerous.

“Yeah? Well what do _you_ know? You’re just a _child_ playing politics for a throne you don’t know how to weild. You ambition has cost the arm of your servant, and what do you have to show for it?” Greed gets a look pulling back cruel lower lip and canine teeth that sometimes still draw blood whenever Ling accidentally runs his tongue along it. “ _Nothing._ ”

It pains like a lethal blow. Feels like a million fishbones shredded into his throat. Knives on him, loyalties turned and pointed in the double-bladed way they come vintinge in, the ebb and flow, tugging at already dead-and-dying grass with that want.

The first thing, Ling had come to realize at seven: was that he was a people pleaser at core and soul, embedded in him like the tossed up sand grains that stick with the sweat that slicks back his bangs pasting them in all odd angles. Farmed that way since picking, it’s some instinctual habit that he can neither shake nor rid of, and works well enough in the favor of someone who’s life aspirations works hand and hand smiling to both front and back of the people he’s meant to be pleasing. The second: for all that bone structure, people pleaser, cementing growth he’s had, it fucking sucks to talk at the head of a crowd, addressing. Third: by all of this culminated, cultivated, he would make for a sucky successor.   

Amestris across the desert stretch, after they’d trekked and traveled—lingered long on the fallen kingdom of people they said had eyes of luminescent jewels, was exactly what Ling had expected and nothing like it all at once.

It was plumes of pollution and farmed rows of pandemonium unfolding like weeds against the carefully constructed obedience backed by a military presence that felt like nails against pulse point. Awful, savergy behest. Corrupt hierarchy funded by long lived lackey’s with a thing for murder. No stars, no rioting color, and Ling mourned that with the same whole of him that missed Xing all the more fierce. Living to the standard of war-won battle siege aesthetic, all passed with a schooled grace that meant everything had a place and plan amidst it’s construction.

“Chaos,” Lan Fan whispered, bounding from a seven foot divot between buildings. “There’s something strange, buried under the dirt here. And it feels like chaos.” Ling nodded and agreed, pulling on a mask of his own, skin tight wearing goofy warm around his grin and saying something about immortal stones being one hell of tourist trap for a place so uncharming as this. How they’d only be there a month at most, only—

Only, for the fact that Ling was greedy and gold glinted in the peripheral of his eye that always was partly scoping of pretty boys and partly searching for leads, happening to work in tandem for one, single moment, snagging and staying on the Elric brothers, to the Fullmetal Alchemist, to Edward, then to Ed and all of Ed’s stupid long lashes, oh so gorgeous skin, with two tunnel-vision eyes sizes of dinner plates starting at a tilt that sparkled against the pale dark that Amestris offered.

The fourth thing that Ling’s realized: the fact that—while horrible and the single most _worst_ place in literally every other way possible, like seriously it _sucks_ —in Amestris he was stripped from the flakes of prince that were left, the hard handle of palace etiquettes and noble’s condescending huffs and all the things that ornate designed classes choked out of him, until he was just him. Just him never fit in volume with Xing. Just him, doesn’t want to go back, when faced with the quiet cricket hymns.

“Face it. You ran from your country, Ling,” Greed continues on with savagery, “with your tail between your legs. You ran trying to chase something you have no command over in a pathetic attempt to get away from it all. Do you even want _it_?”

Yes, yes, yes, and million times yes, Ling’s body sings beneath the callous palm of the accusation; follows like a moth itching towards flame. I want it and a million more.

 _I’m going to become emperor_ , he had promised his clan when it became no more than a spec in the distance, straddled farway from that curve in horizon on pack-animal back. Since then, over the span from the moment his eyes caught that mosaic spec of home, more mirage than palpable reality, he’d tossed it on the flot of his tongue, rolled it across every bump of his molars, sharpening words with it. Hated and choked on it, in the middle of the night. He’d tasted it bittersweet as Lan Fan has held the dagger to where Edward’s shoulders became the colosseum of his neck. He’d spit it out, toed in into dirt flood-like, and stomped until it was beaten and not glowing then pick it up again and carry it on the bare of his throat.

His mother said, _Choose one_ , and to the expectations he did, and swallowed it down promise-like. _I’m going to become emperor_ , _I’m going to become emperor, I’m going to become emperor_.

He thinks: I have never wanted nothing more. Or so to say: I have never known what wanting something other has felt like.

It’s all corners and back ends and curvatures in the same way the alleyways of Tibet that he’d run his hands along until they mapped themselves as easy as the veins on his pale blotches of stretched skin, except now it’s all rearranged and he’s stumbling blind without a pulse thrumming under his messy footfalls.

He doesn’t know, he realizes, what he wants in the after. And that—that’s something that rubs a little too close home bound that Greed has always sharpened it teeth on.

I want to see Lan Fan okay, Ling thinks, coming up desperate. I want Fu’s old, wisen advice in forms of reprimands. I want to plant a garden, I want to go to the beach once again to shove my ankles in the seabed and stay. I want to show Edward my home, I want a home to go back to. I don’t want to have to choose anymore, I want to stay as just me, the one in this moment for the moments that follow. I want to never to back; I want to never leave again. It’s still all wonky and not quite right, but it’s something that keeps him hog tied and devoted to that he chokes under all of it in masses.

And Greed, he—

 _You would know all about that, would you?_ Ling says, color raging in flood-like. Knowing he doesn’t understand what starvation is if he’s never been feed for it. _You’re just as much a coward._

Somewhere, far off, they can hear a rabbit break out it’s hind legs in sprint. “Shut up,” Greed says.  

 _Running from your family, your sisters and brothers,_ Ling goes on, just as ruthless, because realizing he’d be a sucky emperor that part of a decade ago he’d made a choice and felt nails biting into his feather-soft palms, squeezing tighter dressed in loose smiles.

“Stop it,” he growls. A brush rustles, leafs flutters non-threateningly to the surface floor, a twig snaps and startles. It’s an malign instinct, man-made not right, that pulses under earth, thrashes the Dragon’s Pulse, sends up a heartbeat through their veins, in the breathless ways.

He says, just for confirmation, _You ran while your friends were dying in your name._

“I didn’t run, Bradley murdered them!” he protests, and the sounds grow ghoulish in size. Wolves dine, wind touches everything idle like a child pushing through hands through the racks on pretty pattern weavings, crickets bring up the notion of harmony squeaky clean. Souls, so many souls, screaming flush mouths right up against the nipped skin of their ear. In this moment, they can’t fight right. A sweater—bunching at the shoulders, twisting hip wise, scratching and itching and irritating the stretches of coloring skin—worn in all the wrong ways. Just, not _fitting_.

 _While Lan Fan’s blood stains my hands,_ he says, lowly, _theirs have place in your soul among all the other of your sins._

“I AM NOT _HUMAN_!” Greed yowls. A breath. The ache in his lungs feels second handed. A second. “I’m not...I’m not a weak human like you, I ain’t just some flesh body, I’m not as fucking paper thin as the lot of you are.”

The forest returns around them with a startling quiet.Greed grabs one of his own arms in an awkward twist, as if there was someone else there, proffering flesh as comfort. Gathers himself up and arranges pieces of limbs like how companionable comfort it offered in the descriptors of shows, body language screaming a little voiced, _“There, there, hon,”_ but profile giving away none of the awkwardly. Absurdly, it works both ways. Coils of chocolate warmth expanding a ways through them two, twin exertions of the same serotonin and oxycontin.

 _No_ , Ling says. _No, maybe you’re not_ . _But you’re also not just a mindless drone of your father’s ploys anymore, haven’t been really, for a long time._ Since the last century, if Greed’s measured increments of the past gambles of decades have anything near correct. Like it’s his own, he feels the suns lowering grin warming around the ends in total luminescent, a single orb glowing, excitable wide-eye wonder filled to the brim. The first break-out from dirt and iron, digging his way tomb-up from Father’s reach.

 _A puppy’s enthusiasm,_ Lust had commented at his right, with thinly veiled humor curling her flawless red lip. _Up here they call that a sunset, just so you know. It happens every night in intervals of twenty-four hours._

 _It’s beautiful,_ Greed said. _It’s mine. I want them all._

Going back under after that had been more a challenge, never drinking in enough of the outside light to be satisfied as that first moment, and that’s the crux of were all addictions begin at. It was well-mannered snides towards Envy, pokes at Pride with Lust’s cruel gestures behind his back never seen but sending him bent over howling, and Father’s more empty gaze, cold drive more burning than usual until that restlessness built up as gnashing teeth and unclipped claws wrecking a breaking path toward freedom.

From there in a 36,489 more sunsets he’d ended back up sticking his nose in all the wrong places at all the right times, on a whim freeing the lab rats that hit into the ballpark of same recollection when he swept them over, narrow around the eyes.

“Well what am I now? I used to be a glamorous, amazing, mega-bitch. And now?” Greed asks aloud. Still holding onto himself for dear life.

 _Now you have depth,_ Ling tells him, supportingly. Calmer and settled. The red of the souls cooling to maroon, sunset oranges stroked like sky. _And….character._

“Ugh,” Greed says, moody. He’s sitting up now and limply gesturing his left arm, the back of his head against the tree like burr. “The hell are we getting so worked up over? I don’t even remember half the shit about them?”

 _They were your friends,_ Ling says, and it’s no amusement, still raw in the places were the fluttery feeling goes amongst his chest bone, but it’s a near thing and that makes the difference. _You loved them, of course you’re mourning_.

“I,” declares Greed, blood throbbing in his ears, sharp intake of breath through his nose, body like drying magma aflame and cold-shouldered all the same, “am not mourning.”

 

**_________**

 

“So who was going to tell me that I’m stuck at a fifteen-year-old for the rest of eternity?” Greed growls whirling on all of them coming out all silver-rimmed from the forest depth.

Around, fog blue-tinted rises, as if a response to the postured furry, seamless frustration popping everything holding him together to drag past the day all tied up by spite and vengeance. The frustration, though, is different in it’s monstrous rush. Ling’s feelings for Greed's, but he still can’t yet pinpoint the variations in a second nature nurture way despite all trying attempts of deciphering an immortal as if he was put out in blueprint leaf page.

Behind a gloved hand Heinkel coughs. Darius might have choked, a little.

“Uh,” says Edward, eloquently. He sends a long look at Greed, some things never changing with his grace of a newborn when put squatting in midst of sudden conversation. “I thought you already knew.”

Darius looks at Heinkel, and Heinkel looks at Darius back. “He’s fifteen?” Darius asks. “I thought he was at least seventeen.”

“He’s fifteen,” Edward says, not expanding on that.

 _I’m actually younger than Ed by six months,_ Ling tattles giddily, _but still taller than him. I think he’s still a bit bitter about that fact._

“Huh,” Greed says.

“Why are you going on about this now?” Heinkel grunts, stoking the flame that jumps miles merrily, ignorant and shining to the polished conflict.

“I was trying to get a drink nearby but the fucking bartender turned me away because the idiot thought I was underage,” Greed growls, hand twisting for claws.

“You are underage,” Darius says, flat.

“I’m an immortal!” Greed snaps.

 _“_ Reborn four months ago,” Edward pipes up. “Why didn’t Ling tell you before you went in?”

“Yeah, good fucking questions,” Greed snarls, planting himself with thin fingers curving on his waist, chin jutting skyward with a gaze set vertical as if he could tell him off in his own body or the sorts. “Why _didn’t_ you tell me?”

 _I didn’t see how it was relevant_ , Ling hums, a soft buzz in the back of their mind.

“How it was—” Greed sputters. “It was pretty fucking relevant. Could’ve saved me a lot of trouble, you pissant!”

 _Mhmm, true_ , Ling concedes easily _,_ and there’s a smile somewhere in there. _But where’s the fun of that? It gets awfully boring stuck in here you know._

“ _Yes I know_!” says Greed. “I live in there half the time to!”

Ling says, _But you never let me out_.

Greed throws up his hands. “Don’t you try twisting these things with me!”

The others heads’ swivel their line of gaze on Greed as they conversation volley’s from disquiet to mouthfuls of words in a moments flash, as if some tabletop game groups gathered by faithfully.

 _Come on now_ , Ling chatsizes, candy sweet, _you’re starting to make a scene._

“Argh!” Greed screams, sounding awfully like nails on a chalkboard so that the observing trio have to clamp down on their ears with harsh winces. His jerks back down his arms. “You!” he says, sudden again, quick to whirl on Edward who, for his part, only blinks as he crossly stares down the accusing finger. “How old are you?”

“Uh,” says Edward. “I dunno. Fifteen too? Depending on how much time passed maybe sixteen?”  

“ _Son of a bitch_ ,” Greed says then promptly turns on his heel.

There’s a second left in an out of body, trapped in mind sort of experience that leaves Ling sickeningly disoriented, crashing bouts of dizzying confusion good potting soil for migraines. For extra measure Greed flips them off over his shoulder. To his retreating figure there’s a murmur—not in the least bit meant to go hushed—of “Good riddance,” and Ling can glance to see Edward spare a furtive glance before sticking his iron foot fully in spark and miniature mixture of flame made fireworks.

“You’re a fucking idiot, kid,” Greed mutters when the drawl of the forest isn’t enough to satisfy his want for works to shadow their trek. “An absolute fool. A stupid, stupid _human_.”

Ling muses laughingly, if Lan Fan were here she would have probably cut his tongue the split the flesh of the immortal’s jugular at the insolence. An arm thrown across him at the first hearing of imminent life or death threats trained into her instincts along with tools and skill to back them, but the fierce protectiveness comes before the orders and schooling. Comes from when they were raised as family; when the gaping pressure splintered the dam and he couldn’t keep up the grins at the hurtled insults on one afternoon.

In the after and the during of time they’d lived on the streets, surviving the snaking back alleys that only took three days to memorizes and win a place among the 1,609 meters, he’d found places perfect. Lying and cheating and underhanding everyone with cheery smiles a weapon with the double edge of his dadao at their bobbing adam’s apple got you a lot, and the first thing he’d bought with that power was a spot desolate in people.

The second thing he’d done was tell Lan Fan.

“Those people’s tauntings are foolish and childish. They are wrong to call you an idiot. You shouldn’t be so dumb,” she’d whispered to him atop the tallest rendezvous point of the Lema Temple’s plated rooftop.

“I can’t believe you’re taking their side,” Ling groaned into her shoulder, but it had been playful in a daunting taut way of a child’s inside joke that he’s been aloud into for the very first time.  

“No,” she’d defend. “I don’t take the words of them. They’re are wrong in a lot of things, and my own point differs. Also, Ling, _I’m_ aloud to call you out on these things,” and Lan Fan had sniffed, surely, “because I _know_ you. I’ve been by your side since you were a child, and I will not leave it until my end. So I’m the only one and no one else, _young lord_.”

And Ling understood. Raised under the same breadth of bloodshed, side by side in it all, sweat and tears be damned, seen each other past it then further.

Knows then: she’ll lay down her life for me. Decides with a sudden surge of fire and devotion: I’ll make sure she’ll never have to.

(Ling thinks now: m _y_ sword _._ She gave up an arm in his gamble, he’s he’s still struggling to keep a hand on all his cards.)

He said then, “I feel like this is just your way of telling me I shouldn’t lose Fu to pickpocket poor, unsuspecting tourists on the streets.”

Lan Fan laughed—not aloud—but in the smile that crinkled her eyes, pupils wide like oil slicks, the silent sort that made her shoulder huff under the weights and armor and plated protection. The best kind, because it was only shared between them and Ling naively thought, _if I can continue to make her laugh like this it’ll be okay_. “Like you ever could. Now come on before grandfather finds out and we cause him even more grievance.”

In his life, during the landmark points of palace royalty followed by dirty street rat and then impossible questing, Ling has had few people that have truly ever cared for him. Lan Fan and Fu outliers; even his own mother never risking anything past affection given from an arm span distance. Being raised was being groomed for politics delivered just so, always waiting for the second hat to drop when in askance of anything, kept alive because he was the single starburst of hope that his clan had left, like a heavenly body seen light years away in the sky as whole. But gone and denoted.

Dust and dust and pieces scattered universally.    

He was untouchable in many ways, this was just another point why added to the list.

(He’s still not quite sure he didn’t dream it up in the darker reaches of unconsciousness that edge his mind, Edward yelling, _I ain’t letting you die here_ , his touch whispering desperate, _you can’t die, not here in a place where enough blood’s been split._ How he carried him, and in return could only watch was tongues and souls and bodies lifted Edward, hair a halo of gold, body a nation of red.)

 _You care_ , Ling says to the torrent of cries.

He doesn’t expect that to be followed up by anything, maybe denial, perhaps, if Greed was to ever give into breaking his set lying policy. The fleeting silence is loud enough. This escape used often and always in between, slipping in the cracks that spindle as if spider-webbed. It’s the response, really, that jolts him from fading back to numb awareness once more leaving him up and pondering sweetly, until the sun will yawn wide, open mouth gently ebbing closer to the horizon line in loving union.

 _Some things_ , Greed finally decides on, _shouldn’t happen to kids._

 

**_________**

 

When he comes to, they’re still sprawled in the tree tops and Ling has the reigns. He shoots up, toppling but not falling quite.  

“Greed!” calls someone that he’s too disoriented, the whole perspective still too wrong, too _raw_ to grasp, saying: “Get up it’s time—”

“Ling,” he says, raspy, returning; everything running back like blood rushing to his ears, a few taken moments paused, freeze framed, with the static sound of Heinkel’s small battery operated, military issued radio drawling on about weather and instrumentals in the upcoming by Faye Haven, Edward, an ever unforgettable presence always _there_ , even if cornered off alone in a solitude nook with the low light of reading delights present on his face, a pencil poised, and Darius beneath him with a grace for evening awakenings all they way on the other end of the spectrum of natural birdsong. Mindful of all this and more, the further ears and nose and eyes travel through sense, he levers himself down the natural step ladder the tree’s depressions and markings give.

Darius arches a heavy brow. “What does the kid have to do with you getting up?”

“Everything,” says Ling, “considering _the kid_ ’s the one in control.”

“Doesn’t matter whose in charge of who as long as one of you is walking that body the next twenty miles as a speedy pace,” Darius says.

“Why I’m absolutely hurt, dear sir,” Ling sniffs, settling on his heels. “Here I thought we were star-crossed friends in an impossible way, bonded together through our trials and triumphs of our quest.”

“Save the flowery flattery for any strayway MPs, brat,” Darius says with narrowed resignation through the glow of his eyes, almost widely inhuman. He turns on his foot, broad shoulders rippling under his parka back to Ling. “Heinkel’s gonna be back soon from checking the traps so we can eat, then leave. Go bother the kid while you wait, he’s been reading that damn book all night. The dumbass better not be so tired he can’t walk, ‘cause I ain’t carrying him.”

Ling glimpses the corner edge, acknowledging the coloring and state Edward drinks the ink off the pages fervently. One of few Heinkel had came back with a month ago, arms carrying loads of to-be gifted weather bound books, any and all unmissed texts certainly not paid for by any means to the chagrin of Greed and admission of Edward, up until the point where he had run those hungry eyes over the covers then taken them with eager palms with the air of an avid starved man.

The dense blocks of words are too much for the slow upbringing of his sleepy state, just babble spotting few in between words from the page, taking Ling a moment after snagging on the tail ends of another one of the curlier characters, that the books written in Xingese, slanted margins of notes in Amestrian the something older, crudely different. Familiar but so distant to be considered that.

It’s nothing he recognizes.

“What’s that?” Ling squats down unannounced, putting himself blunty into Edward’s space. He refrains from pointing a finger against the page, because a quick glance up has Edward’s eyes bugging comically and ears up in flames. “The language. I’ve never seen script like that before.”

“Uh.” Edward sends him a cautious look over the upper page. “Words, sentences.”

“Yes, Ed.” Ling nods seriously, deadpan at once. “Words tend to make sentences that then make paragraphs, but what language?”

“I, uh, dunno. I mean—” Edward swallows thickly, and Ling can’t stop himself from watching the Adam’s apple bob, for just that moment there, how his eyes dart then flicker down to paperback, so pretty and open— “it’s just the crap that bastard wrote with in all his books. I’ve only ever seen again in some back burner texts at the First Library. It was actually the first langue me and Al learned reading wise, so you can imagine the hell our teacher gave up for ‘writing in made-up scribbles’. Guess I never grew out of it. Mom always said it looked pretty.”

Ling imagines Edward younger at five with a furious scowl and eyes raveling in the studies, how he white knuckled his pen, scrapping at loose notes with the point tearing through the thin pages. Imagines the Edward of now, taking him up in those same hands with that same scowl softened pillow-like whenever he truly lets up to care in that scarce minute where he’s not skittered and nerves balled in an angry truffle, those same oxidizing eyes pinning him, with lips and tongue.

Burning mortified red fervent all along him jolts him back, and fuck, Ling’s grateful he’s always runned warmer than normal, shifting slightly to ease away of the slips of embarrassment, swallowing then saying as casually as he can with it only cracking on the second word, “It is. Even if your handwriting is so god awful.”

“Fuck off,” Edward says without heat. Just tired, letting himself drop on the book’s upper lip, curling in himself with a full body shiver that shakes.  

“Cold?” Ling asks, gathering his wits again.

Edward groans, throaty. “Fucking _yes_. It’s freezing balls out here, what do you think?”

Without thought, Ling’s already shrugging off his jacket with it between his palms in silent offering. Edward lifts his head sharply, blinking himself in a stupor, looking like he’s staring at the equivalent of a particularly hard equation between the line of Ling’s arm and the coat, his fluster glowing. For a second—maybe—Ling thinks he’s broken him.

“Oh,” Edward gulps, and Ling wonders openly. It’s almost shy, he finds with some level of smug. “You don’t—aren’t you cold?”

Ling lifts his shoulders, halfheartedly. “No,” he says honestly. He isn’t sure if it’s just him or the Philosopher's Stone.

“Ah,” says Edward still hesitant and pink on his nose. Ling groans.

“Just—god, here. Take it, put it on. You look pathetic. Just think of it as me paying off my dept to you.” Ling goes in to tug it on himself, pulling the sleeves up Edward’s arm still running with residual warmth in all it’s crevices and creases, pooling a little to big making him look a little to beautiful, so to save face Ling adds in continuous babble: “Totally not appropriate of the Fullmetal Alchemist, youngest state alchemist to ever join, Hero of the People, slayer of demons.”

“Shut up, no one calls me the slayer of demons. You’re like a furnace, by the way, and owe me a whole lot more than a jacket with a hole in it,” Edward mumbles, ducking behind the collar, tugging it up with his cold-bitten fingers. He pushes the pad of his thumb through and in a rip down on the dusting hem of it, avoiding bringing his chin any higher. He _is_ shy, Ling thinks amazingly. “But, yeah. Thanks. This is better. Wish I had my old jacket, y’know,” Edward goes hurriedly, diving deeper in the fabric cuff that covers well, “the red one with the hood and Flamel mark. This one I’ve been wearing is just...bad.”

“Bad?” Ling asks.

“Yes, _bad,_ ” Edward huffs. “It’s scratchy and feels weird and is just _so, so wrong_ and—” He pulls up his bottom lip, gnashing between a row of white, sinking in cracked skin pink. “Nevermind. That doesn’t make sense. Supima cotton is one of the most organic types of fabrics and a decent insulator. This jacket just happens to sucks ass.”

“Then tell me, cotton connoisseur, which is the better type of fabric?” Ling says, teasingly letting his head drop but linger low where the latter’s shoulders lift, a steady presence.

“Modal is better,” Edward declares certainly. Like he’s had this discusses, pulled his facts, stretched the point wry. “Feels...worn. It’s comfy. Nice, I guess. Like it’s what I’ve made my coat—y’know the red one, with the Flamel symbol and shit—out of this whole time and if it was anything else I think I would have stabbed myself with my automail three years ago.”

“I might understand,” Ling says. The discomfort, cotton in your throat.

Edward waves ambivalently. “Nah, it’s different. Apparently. According to Mustang. Bastard says it’s something mentally or some other crap. Al agrees there’s something more than just comfort, but.” He shrugs. “It’s whatever.”

“I guess I can relate then, partially,” Ling amends. “In the matter of comfort, shoes here in Amestris are so awful. Your feet can’t _breath_ and there’s no dexterity. Trying to scale buildings and keep light footsteps is the worst with them. It’s more of a cultural and condition issued with your thing about coats, but similar in theory I suppose.”

“Yeah. I get it,” says Edward, looking gentle.

Ling opens his mouth, to say something more because this is one of the first times they’ve talked and he’s seen Edward’s bright smile not scowling as if through him, and Ling is just as starved for affection as Edward was for his books and notes, but then Darius is calling out to them that, “Heinkel got back with the grub from the snares. Both of you get over here and eat something before we go,” and Ling really too much of a coward to do anything but drag his heels over like a kicked puppy.

“Quick question for the both of you, just for confirmation, but,” Heinkel says as they settle, handing out spiked rabbit like lollipops at a fair, “you two are...friends. Right?”

Edward rolls his eyes with waves of heated sarcasm Ling could feel from his side of the steadily growing flame, involving a thoughtful hum around gnawing meat. “Yeah, to be honest I think our whole friendship stems from our mutual shared—” Ling cuts in, voices overlapping— “daddy issues.”  

Heinkel doesn’t look impressed. “What.”

“Even Greed has awful daddy issues now that I’m thinking about it,” Ling goes on with conspiracy, nodding solemn, pad of this thumb and pointer finger a neatly fitting L propping up the jut-edge of his chin. “He killed him in a pit of lava for fucks sake after he....” Stops there. As if there’s glue sticky on his hands not in his control, red and heavy again, slick against the weight heavy as a corpse, he trails off.

Blankly, Heinkel stares at the pair of them before shuttering down with a low hanging head. “We’re in way over our heads with these kids,” he mutters through the corner of his mouth to Darius, who nods almost mournfully.

“Ah, shuddup,” Edward says past a mouthful.

“Hey,” Darius snaps. “You might be a fugitive, kid, but I refuse to watch you chew with your mouth open. We ain’t feeding wild animals.”

“Says the gorilla. I’m eating for two, shove off,” mutters Edward offhandedly before mauling into again on the poor rabbit leg, staring challenging at Darius’ chest as if proving a point.

Heinkel half-chokes and half spits out the rest of his drink. “You pregnant kid?” he asks incredulously.

Edward swallows haphazardly on a breath in his mouth. He coughs twice and pounds his chest three times before taking another bite. “ _The fuck_ ? No, it’s —the hell, I’m not _pregnant_! I just, uh….am very hungry and need to eat a lot since I use up so much energy and health reasons like that. Um. Oh, automail, remember?”

They look at him, eyes blank and wide with the weight of disbelieving large as twin moons. Finally, Heinkel says with no faith in the answer at all, “No wonder your so short.”

“I hate y’all.”

“Your also loud,” Darius says.

“And annoying,” says Heinkel.

“And when you get really pissed at something your voice cracks.”

“Ever so slightly.”

Edward rolls over, largely inhaling the last of his rabbit. “You two are literally the worst.”

“But they’re not wrong,” Ling says, chewing pleasantly.

Edward turns on him, pinning Ling with a furious look. His face smooths. Dangerously. “I’m going to kill you Ling Yao,” he says, the pinnacle of calm.

“Oo? We going with the brick again or something with more of a flourish?” Ling cooes, always the messiah, pointedly turned a blind eye to the tilted confusion Darius turns to Heinkel with.

“I’ll stab you, push you off a cliff,” Edward goes on, causally. “Poison, perhaps?”

Ling snorts, crossing his arms. “You can’t poison me. I have a built up tolerance to six different kinds.”

“I’ll just use the other seventeen you aren’t safe against then,” Edward shoots back. Ling bites threateningly at him.  

“Hey, hey,” Heinkel interjects. “Chewing with our mouths close, remember? And aren’t you supposed to be a prince or somethin’? What happened to the little fork and big spoon drama you’re suppose to have along with a side of manners?”

“We don’t use the same sorts of utensils as Amestrians in Xing.” Ling swallows hugely, gaiting in another savage tear at his rabbit to talk through, muffling: “We only really use chopsticks and those are pretty easy to get as long as you're not trying to purposely stab out an eye.”

“I feel like this is a jab at me, somehow,” Edward says.

“Maybe so,” says Ling. Grinning, too. The picture of mature, chin raised and pose with defiance to keep tight-lipped back, with Edward across from him sticking out his tongue, mulish somehow despite the stiffness and red that crawls fervently along his neckline.

And Ling, he—

Actually enjoys it. This.

He’s warm, like burning coals sunk into his gut—and for once not at due to the souls or the merry fire or the worry or the guilt, feeling just warm because of something deeper, rooted firmly leafing out and brushing the untouched places along him, and stays that way even after Greed peels open his blurry consciousness into full control again and they winter picks up with predatory savagery and they’re back to being hard-crossed fugitives.

It’s nice, he finds.

 

**_________**

 

Ling wakes up one day, pressed flush against Edward, warm and whole.

The ouroboros tattoo is sprawled haphazardly on Edward’s beating ribcage, Ling’s right palm curled sleepy under his neck. Used as a pillow, used as protection.

From what flashes alarmingly in Ling’s mind with the slow fed speed of remnants and thoughts dripping painstakingly sluggish he remembers another whispered chant of lavished sorrys and heart held names. He remembers taking his head into his lap and soothing long fingers through teases of mud and sticks and hair. Remembers how unaware and starved Edward pressed close and fearful.

Ling’s heart ripped and he can’t offer protection and a way to make things right, he’s never lived by equivalent exchange that Edward’s twisted (because he only fished him a monster, as Edward turned himself to bait and lured them all free of ocean blood), but the need to protect has always been something stabbing like rose thorns behind his chest. Refuting outsider affection because scheming and scamming are easier when you don’t know the soul behind drawn up anger, trickster langue easier on his tongue when he’s got a goal wrapped in his clan tight in his fist to keep close.

Now his heart plays a fiddle and his mind laughs brutish at being so enticed by beautiful gold eyes and lipped smiles meant to duck unseen behind a curtain of unruly hair. It’s awful and strange and he wishes, desperate, that there was a chance to enjoy it.

Wishes it didn’t probe his grins to morph into something sweeter, brimmed with a little more truth than he’s handed out before, lips always tended to turn upward like a cup overflowing with the absolute emotion he gets from the foolish boy that came from the country and stole the admiration of a country.

Ling has a family large as half a hundred, and there’s only been one he’s ever worn the closest to an open face around.

(But his mother was also the one to press iron blades to his six-year-old hands, that night turning her eyes a winter storm, powerful and cold and cruel as is an emperor’s wife—one he’s always felt the wrath of it’s war path in hands that run icy and cradle him a little to tight—but for the first time freeze him fully, to the point where parts of him shattered to disrepair under the weight of the knife’s hilt, telling, “Choose one.”)

He used to the masks people find prettier than others. The way they’ve molded wax-like over every bump of his face, the ridges of his bones until he’s made it his as if a second skin. But glimpses Edward’s sun-bright face from the corner of his eye and can’t offer anything but back breaking honesty.

 _Take it_ , the Greed in him says and with some manner of calm Ling manages to tell him he doesn’t know how and pulls away from the apple and snake.

It’s excruciating, separating himself from the cocoon of warmth they make huddled together—because the soulfire an internal ignition inside of him has nothing on arms wry and thick wrapped around him, unable to uphand how each ride of the chest sends him tipsy with stomach full of butterflies. It flickers hotly hesitant. Edward twists at the loss, breath soft against his lips and still close enough that he can’t count each individual yellow lash along his eyes. Ling’s heart plants itself firmly in his throat. Stopping him there.

But he’s already dragged Lan Fan and Fu to a city starved with extinction amidst dust and cobble in a desert that’s never been forgiving and will never turn to change her ways in a herculean effort for a claim to the throne. Taunted circles around gods, and played the jester well enough so they didn’t see the poison slipped into their cups. He doesn’t get to ask for this, too.   

Like wildfire, Greed murmurs, _Take it_ . _You want it, right? Leave it and run, and you’ll be a coward again_. Slowly the sun blooms and his grasp at control leaks away with ebbing sensations as the fact of the matter unspools before him.

Ling shuts his eyes beneath the daybreak and thinks, _I can’t choose this_.

 

**_________**

 

They’ve been to a total of four towns, not including the quick run through of train-trading mischief and reconnaissance all those months ago, and Greed has crossed his arms and planted feet firm in the decision to keep him shut away lock and key through the reel of it all. Only fluorescent glimpses of moments as Ling is picked apart from the here and there, peeled by all his layers as if the ripe flesh of mango. The shivery red a nirvana, where he prostrates himself laid out in all parts of himself. Less himself. A little more.

He watches through grainy resolution as they flake around, discreet in the manner they snatch from shelves and leave backdoor enroute with medicines for Edward who writhes and wears a sheer of sweat brightening the low haze of delirious pain some days. How Greed with stalk around forest intermittently circling back close to group, then back again, as if he’s checking the others are still there, whenever in crowds of forest or foliage of buildings.

Like now; Greed prowling corner side on Cardend village road, them all just docked in a lovely enough village with a charming enough hospitality to spare aside, where the connections of Darius promises carved a home out into.

Greed’s steps click, sharp.

Ling watches his eyes direct a heated look through the fan of his lashes. He huffs, tosses up a tassel of hair with the momentary airborne circulation. Lets himself skim along the listed remains of their patchwork group, Edward carefully golden again washed away of the stripped disguises with hair decorated starkly in a lazy handed bun, Heinkel, Darius absence a preparation for mourning an old war buddy, the one he promised would shelter them—”I’m so sorry,” the widow said in askance as soon as she opened the door, saw them, saw her and grief aged features, pulling weights under her eyes, “Japeth died two years ago”—a gaping dynamic missed in principle.

“It feels wrong,” Edward had said on the subject when the widow smiled so it wrinkled her eyes to make up for how it fell brittle telling them to make themselves and home and use household appliance to any delight, as he peeled jacket and boots from his skin, slow paced undoing of the white button-up, pausing midway with his fingers left drifting along the next button, so Ling has shovel down the sudden flare of want.

Heinkel looked him over with a drawn nose. “Kid, when was the last time you took a shower?”  

“Not since the time we left for the North,” and instinctively Ling knows from the genuine warmth of the tone, the we being him and his brother. His eyes went to Edward’s right, that felt missing.

“Well there you go,” Greed said heading pointedly to the door. “I can’t keep using my stone to continue to repair my nostrils that your awful smell burns up.”

Newly clean and smelling like roses, they stroll pointlessly now on cracked cement channels and blossoms of crowds that center around certain stalls. There’s an air to it, that Ling’s always identified closely with the grandesques celebrations that only Xing could follow up to par with, in the primary brightness that colored skies and table tops. A stab of empty pings through him, and he feels an animalistic surge burst through him, and has to put a handle of Greed from flipping any few stray stares the bird and draw an angiries attention.

“Oo, they’re cute,” Greed comments lightly, as a pack of people in early twenties passes. “Wonder if they’d be any good in bed?”

“Ew,” Edward says, looking thoroughly uncomfortable.

Ear to ear Greed smirks at the sight, tilted his head on the accompanying onslaught of red rushing up Edward’s neck, from more than just the drafty chill. He sweeps a broad arm. “C’mon, Goldilocks. Don’t tell me you’re not interested in any of them.”

“They _look_ pretty, yeah I suppose” Edward shifts. He twists his body away. “You’re just being overly gross. Leave me out of this.”

Greed tilts his head, eyes shining like bitter wine. “Mhm, no appreciation for the simple things with this newer generation.”

Ling says, _Don’t you dare do anything with my body, Greed_.

“You can’t tell me what do do with _my_ body,” he returns petulantly, shoving claws under each crook of the elbow and jutting out his chin with an air of an immovable force of stubborn making up his entirety, but Ling can feel it systematically, the disappointed filter and resolve fade easily in the empty words as he takes in his other two companions with a turn of eyes. “So what about you, big guy? Have anyone keeping the bed warm?”

“Yeah, was in a few relationship here and there before they left after I wouldn’t stop waking up screamin’ about guns and fire,” Heinkel says, effectively stopping that follow up of conversation in a dead set of tracks.  

“Well,” Greed drawls, stepping up in pace that land harder than Ling’s own footfalls would on dirt. “We’re staying for a few days waiting for that train to the east out here, right? So you—” a nails a finger at Edward— “should get me meat. I’m hungry.”

“No,” says Edward nodding his head away. “Get yourself your own fucking food.”

“What’s the point of being your leader,” Greed asks, “if I can’t make you do the stuff I don’t want to do?”

“I don’t know. The title of leader not enough for you?” Edward grumbles.

Greed straightens out sharply with eyes on Heinkel. “Minion, make him go get me meat.”

Heinkel’s eyes lazily drift up. “No.”

“Why are you taking his side?” Greed whines, back of the soles dragging again.

“Because he’s my emotional support chimera,” Edward quips.

Heinkel bumps his lower forearm to Edward’s shoulders, knocking him down a few notches and leaving him bent over wheezing for a moment. “Cheer up you stupid twink.”

“Thanks lion,” he gasps with little air passing through his lungs.

“Yeah, get me some steak and we’ll call it even,” Heinkel says and Edward’s face falls, expression leaping off a cliffside hill.

“All of you can fuck off,” Edward says, turning head. “If you want meat go to the butcher’s shop yourself. I ain't.”

 _Ask him why_ , Ling thinks, curious for no rhyme nor reason.

“Ask him yourself or better yet shaddup _,”_ Greed huffs and half is whispered under a curled lipped because he’s getting distracted again by the gentle wonder of the town lit up in snowy icing and firefly lighting. Coughs, then says aloud, “Fine, fine. Don’t be such a pissy toddler. So what’s with all these decorations? They know I was comin’ or something?”

Edward’s interest darts, with his hair a pendulum with every roll-eyed twist of the neck. “Hm? Oh this? It’s just some Harvest Festival stuff.”

“Huh?” says Greed.

“A pretty popular celebration from the countryside,” Heinkel takes over when it’s clear shrieking children with candy apple’s fisted tight and thrown up with their hands above their heads captures Edward’s fleeting attention. “Nationwide sorta thing nowadays. Originally just meant to wish for good fortune and farming, but then city folk decided they liked the idea of feast and partyin’ too so they started celebrating it yearly.”

“Partying, you say?” Greed grins, eyes going smug. “Sounds like my kinda thing. Fucking finally!” He spins to Edward. “Will there be alcohol?”

“None for you,” Heinkel says, tugging him away by shoulder force. “Remember. You’re underage.”

“No I’m not!” Greed says, shrugging him off hastily, protesting all the while like a petulant little kid most defiantly underage would. “You _know_ I’m not!”

“But do we actually though?” Edward sing-songs. “After all you _do_ look only fifteen. And it would be awfully illegal to just standby and allow a minor to drink.”

“You son of a bitch,” Greed hisses glowering towards him.

Edward leans in, eyes split sharp. “Just think of the scandal.”

“You’re literally a runaway dog,” Greed says. “You not behind bars yet is a crime in itself.”

“You existing is a crime against nature,” Edward says, loudly.

The carbon solidifies in a fist, nails ricocheting against the stony palm. “How much did they say was the return money again?” Greed asks, matching tone, furious and boiling, a gunshot wound straightaway through caution and reason. “I’ll have to check again, see how many drinks I can buy with that. I”m sure your brother will be very happy to hear the fact your not dead when it makes news.”

“Oh,” Edward hisses, meeting him low, “but daddy and the rest of the freak family will be just as glad when I drag you down with me, you body-snatching piece—”

“Both of you quit it!” growls Heinkel from behind, interjecting a little too much animal into the voice to distinguished from human and not. The leftovers responsibility at it’s finest. He curls fingernails a little too pointed until they’re smooth and flat again on each of their shoulders, heavy weight and palming out blind for some resolution. “Like the plan says, we’re staying here for a few days so just go hang out away from one another under the ruse of visiting the festivale. We’ve got a whole town, that should be enough space for the both of ya’.”

And that’s the end of that because collectively they’ve all got to look out for one another, so when Edward bares his teeth in semblance of something meaner than a smile and hisses, “Fine,” thrashing in his steps as he leaves silence and a laden fog in his wake, Greed doesn’t lead on.

Just sniffs pointedly, with a jutted chin, saying to Heinkel: “Don’t die, minion.” Then leaves.

Brings it back. Spends the next day among pedestrians and flagging music and long bottled drinks, Ling stuck in his movie-film reel drifting in and out like an arrowless mark, feeling floaty and wrong throughout the entirety. Chaining him, the only thing keeping him from becoming red and crying and gone, is the still constant roll of months-before anger all richly spent on another beer that only gives a dixie high lasting fewer and few moments in between by the minute.

When Ling was six he had mastered the art of baiting nobles and councilmen for another wrapped sweet in line and sinker. Like fables of morals and conquest consequences, his mother haunted past the halls uncaring with feet off the ground as he’d hoard bunches, poking away when Lan Fan came into the picture and squawking when she’d fisted out a knuckle-full out of his pile with big eyes and tight lips in her stubbornness. When he was nine he’d made his first trade of family in Fu and Lan Fan for staying nest-side, homeless and poor and without a pocket of coin for the first time and it had been the best part of childhood. It hadn’t been everything but it’s been better then stuffling walls and rooms the size of ceiling high stories muffling him to the point where his throat would burn with it.

Ling’s greed is different from the homunculus with never ending souls of many. He carries the utility of one while Greed has that in thousands put out tenfold, Ling realizes at some point during the feelings of flying through clouds. An ocean, he thinks and sees red. A wildfire in midst of an ocean, against all impossible odds, looking existence stubborn-eyed in the face and sitting duck. Understands better than before. _Oh_.

There’s still marketplace idle, stalls catching in the replacement for music and cheer alongside humming townsfolk and the few in between starry-eyed tourists when Ling blinks into bleary consciousness. They pull out the unruly mares than have no masters only partners as passbery and passerby coin bait for free rides. Ribbons and bodies fold in the same impossible ways, in one corner. Packs of barefoot children run rampant, champion cries so ungentle at their lips. At the other side, dance travels with the risen triumphant birdsong of beatful drumming and plucked at strings, dutifully and beautifully played by talent filled fingers with a way of working.

 _Let me out_ , he says, during one point where Greed has sectioned off to a corner fervently wishing he could stay drunk for more than a minute while his interests travels over all the ridges and depressions the festivals offers during off-hand moonlight trysts.

“No,” Greed says on automatic, long fingers wrung around the bottles neck. Then pauses. “What? Why would I let you out?”

 _Because you love me_ , Ling sings cheerily.

Greed says, “I hate you.”

 _No,_ Ling says, knowing and young but still so, so smug in the ways that ambition and arrogance has taught him into. _You don’t_.

Greed stops there. Smooth river-like strides ended there, in the midst of shadows that bare resemblance. Bitterly, he spits, “No, I don’t,” and immediately downs another quart, liquid going slick and sweet down his throat. “Barely. Sorta can stand you when you’re not annoying me during my vacation.”

 _But this isn’t a vacation_ . For a moment he hesitates, the second shuddering through them both full body, before he resolves himself to the same carbon shield in spirit that Greed has in flesh, saying, _I want to talk to Ed._

Greed’s brows almost disappear in their hairline as he mouths a small _finally_. “Oh so that’s what this is about. Fucking lovestruck idiot.”

Something smug and soft at once cracks within them. It’s the same something that knots deep in his gut, the thing that carries this unflappable, collollausol flame towards Edward. Carrying a torch, a forest fire, a hydrogen flare, all ticking bombs waiting ready to overlap that minute hand and hour one and go off right in his face. _Guilty as charged,_ Ling smirks.

Greed scoffs. “Yeah well, at least you admitted it.” He drawls: How about no? Leave the pipsqueak to his sulking if he’s going to be such a brat, throwing a tantrum like that.”

 _You should stop trying to provoke him so much,_ Ling thinks. _I don’t think he understands yet it’s simply how you care for people._

“I don’t give a crap about that kid. I’ll provoke him all I want,” Greed growls out.

 _Well, okay,_ Ling concedes easily, then going, _He is awfully cute when angry._

“You’re pathetic.”

 _Aren’t I?_ Ling hums. _His eyes always are so pretty whenever his lips curve adorably, turning to actual gold_ —

“Dear _god_ !” Greed says, anger an oven. “Fine, fine! I’m letting you out for one night, if it’ll get you to stop waxing poetics about the kid’s eyes!” He huffs, giving into the push and pull constantly rocking like a stormhold ship against the rocky waves that threatens to swallow sailors and sea legs alike all the time. That ocean of red, again, devouring. This swallow isn’t any kinder, but Ling’s learned to sink with it and Greed follows well enough. “Do whatever you want, and for the love of everything that’s mine don’t run him in circles with this shit or even _I_ won’t be able to look him in the face on behalf of any and all embarrassment for you.”

“You,” Ling whispers with his mouth, wearing a smile that feels soft on his lips, “are a horrible wingman.”

 _Excuse you_ , _I’m a brilliant wingman when I’m trying, which I’m not right now because you’re too much of an idiot for help_ , Greed says. _Now don’t to anything I wouldn’t do while I’m napping. Go take what you want, you pissant._

A dashing girl lets her hair billow sharply behind her with ankles like lightning, running aside the dancing circle that overcomes her in bonfire laughter, bright and warm. She disappears in the crowd, a blur of movement and creamy color.

Ling stumbles like a newborn fawn, collecting his senses as his that blind him in a sudden, colorful brightness. He hears her in the wind’s howl, the winter’s snowfall. In the frost that forms than welts under his heat.

 _(Choose one,_ said his mother cold and young with a goddess's eyes like ice.)

This swallow isn’t any kinder, he knows. It’s harsh and cruel and warm in the way it burns down his neck and throat, cheeks and ears, but now Ling has experience. He dives into the crowd, feet a parade just to keep up with the sweep that takes him bodily.

It’s then he hears it.

“Ling?”

It’s telling, how accustomed he’s become to that sound, turning enroute and tilting to it, letting it swaddle him as white noise takes over the background in those sylablls—how, on the other hand he’s seen and picked apart the differences in walk and talk that towers to make Greed and Ling respectively.

Then it all returns, Edward panting against the wall of pelting music and sound, saying, “Ling!” in a way so relieved and breathless in it’s confirmation, stumbling the last few of Ling’s steps as if he’d came between a crashing wave, ocean water and salt not as sweet as his lips moving to the attuned shout of another’s name. They fall, a clamor of trumpets against sand and dirt housing dead-or-dying grass, splotches in honey yellows and winter white, Edwards arms a tight coil scooping around his back, his neck, his chest—and Ling, he’s not much better.

He holds all of Edward violently, with a passion, takes the wiry metal and warm flesh that breathes like the sun, wholly and good. Warm in the sense that it’s not yet set, because that great, omnipresent god wide and running with thousands of beams of pure heat, and impossible to leave completely.

“Hey there, Ed,” he murmurs soft to the crown of his hair, where that stubborn, fly-away cowlick flickers like open flame under his nose. “Turns out I have some time for this.”  

Ling dips his head backward, from the overwhelming warmth just by looking and drinking that in like a starved man. A very weak, starved man.

The minute time separation has Edward stepping back sheepish in his small stumbled away, a pleasing flush crawling red, and that want is back again. The one that came before the demons and immortals. Before the circled magic with powers running through lifeforce and earthen veins. Devouring Ling’s hold with that same ravenous lurch at his heart.

(He wants, he wants, he wants—)

For a moment, Edward’s hands hover mid-air uselessly, a shameful hesitation that flutters bravely in a seconds time with confidence renewed by the cover of nightly festivities. “C’mon then, _young lord_ ,” Edward says, grinning cryptic, reaching out by the flesh of his fingers, “if you’ve got time, then lemme show you how we dance over in Amestris.”

Ling holds on tight, too. The automail bites and the left feels more like wrapped ice than glove and bone, but he’s never shied and cowered under those sorts of things. The arms settle soundly like fit puzzle pieces around his neck, Ling’s own hands planted pleasant on waist.

It’s like staring down the edge of a cliff, where the future comes in splashes in the back of his eyelids, scratched out and rewritten but they all come down to a moment of wind whipping and pure bliss. Before the crash.

When Ling was nine or ten there’d been a tutor brought at beck and call with scrolls tied on barebacked and years of cultural study of nine different countries under belt at the fresh, baby-faced age of twenty-eight. The lessons where grueling in their most terrible Pyrrhic knowledges permanently seared through harsh and harsher methods.

“If one wants to make it to the throne atop a country,” said Nian Zhen in that stern and clipped gait, skills pressed into form and grace so different from the stiff posture he’d been told to keep for years. “They must be able to grasp and understanding of borders outside of the country lines that separate us. Those stalls in the marketplace are insulting to it.”

“I already had classes on this,” Ling had whined, though kept his back straight and narrow gaze cut ahead without cessation.

“To know your allies you must have dissected them from the inside out. The teachings and life of their people is key, young master, to becoming a worthy adversary to sit alongside at the world table.” Nain Zhen’s face titled with a spill of thoughtfulness. “Good to know the same for enemies, too.”

Re: Drachman proper dining etiquette down to each iron topped prong of four spiked silverware; Aerugo’s sport for taming animals with the sharpest, knife-like snarls showing an audience of pearly whites; Cretan variates of creamy colored artisan; Atenian spindle talents for weaving; Jawhela home-dish specialties, so like and far from Xing’s, always a sure fire way to get him mouth-watery; then Amestrian dancing, that spun him around great castle wall halls pulling high and decorated, sending him off tipsy and seeing stars.

For all intent and purpose of safety, they didn’t leave a child still growing into himself—all long legs and armfuls of wry arms to big and awkward for a room—in situations too dire or timeful, but he does know the step dances and waltzes by tempo and clicks of polished heels in all different sorts of areas of Amestris by ingrained ache, sometimes still sees the music sheets and quick ballroom turn arounds if he closes his eyes a little too long, but finds himself savagely wanting to learn anew from this smiling country boy taken into arms as a stronghold weapon of metal and magic with a hundred megawatt smile cranked up to blinding as the sun as if he’s forgotten just how.

Edward is a creature of carefully crafted contradictions; all at once above all and next tumbled beneath its foot, wanting touch with brushes of passing hands and flinching back as if fired seared through skin, bone, and all the rest. His own set of rules that Ling wants to learn totally. It’s inappropriate and troubled and will lead to such disaster, but Ling finds him divinely beautiful still, unfailing to leave him there, softly stunned as snow falls and the earth revolves.

Fall, falling, fallen from the overlooked cliffedge, toppled into a strange step dance that pushes partners together in a series of criss-cross motions that they both stumble through graceless, grinning all the while. The sounds are an awful guide cane—neither of them have ever been one to follow though, to rebellious in aspects flowered by youthful independence. They sway with it, swept up along with the rest of the crowd’s gait. Stepping in squares, and traipsing in circles.

A laugh bubbles up and Ling chances a glance. Where he lacks along the rest of him, Edward’s hair stretched long and tall pooling like waterfalls from the broad shoulder stance that catches the light richly just right and _there_. In the dark with bulbs of fairy light for luminosity he’s radiant. Hair sticks sweetly to his face in beads of sweat that freeze cooly in empty, cold air. Makes up for it in hot breaths that come out somewhat labored. “This is kinda, pretty great.”

“You haven’t got a rhythmic bone in your body,” Ling tells him.

Edward snorts. “Well not like your much better there,” he retorts. “You’ve stepped on my feet five times already.”

The toe of his boot trips and Ling missteps, landing on the rubber stub of Edward’s shoe. Innocently, he says, “Oh?”

Golden eyes narrow accusingly. “You did that on purpose,”

“Why I have no idea what youre talking about, Ed. These shoes are awfully big and clumsy on me, remember?” says Ling, testing his tongue along his lower lip. He watches Edward’s eyes track it, keenly bright, before sharply snapping up again. The music slows, like water paddling lightly to the riverbed after the cliff fall of the waterfall.

Edward breathes, and takes his hand harder. “Come on.” Their feet are in a flurry of movement again. Fast paced compared to the wispy couples tipping back and forth like willow tree limbs in wind. Ling stumbles their rooted legs, ducking low to consenpate for his langy height that feels gawky and bumbling, mumbling ‘excuse me’ few inbetween to spread through the crowd. Edward squeezes his fingers. He whispers, “Let’s go find somewhere quiet to sit.”

And Ling—Ling is someone’s whose heard scripts and speeches drawn in foot thick rolled parchment, snaking along terracotta tile flooring in elegant Xingese script, has been

But there’s something so awkwardly genuine from Edward (this whispered about boy from nowhere and everywhere, hushed and quiet in passing talk, _that ain’t human_ , they say) who stumbles with feelings loose on the flat of his tongue, who gives himself up to those demands and wants letting it tide him in. It’s sweet. Edward is sweet and Ling wants another dollop of honey, another high of sugar.

And it’s that chase, addicting then some added, is what probably lands them spilled out with legs swinging hazards along a flat-top roof, unspokenly challenging to see who can swing the farthest without fallen, and then, unnoticeable so, unintentionally playing footsies, side to side, arm to arm. Intertwined, his hands runs over the bump and depressions of every knuckle and scar, wondering at the parts callous and the others soft, a coward not to give Edward the profile obviously spelling every affection and love he’s ever given to the thing he carries for Edward and more, staring resolutely forward and ahead.

Spots dance circles, circlet hoops and suits and ragtag-put-together clothes in a constant shifting movement, all the people in colors a shock against the lay of the land still heavy in dark.

For a town centered bullseye on profits around the income and outcome of coal mine quarries, it’s awfully green in its beauty, Ling finds. He says, “It’s not Xing, but Amestris can be quite pretty.”

For long, keen seconds Edward’s quiet in his competitiveness. “If we don’t win,” he eventually says, little more than a whisper, “this’ll all be gone.”

“Then we’ll win,” Ling tells him as if it were simple as that. As if they were still naive and younger in bloom. He wished. He’d even once believed.

“But what if we don’t?” Edward says. “What if—”

“There’s no other option,” Ling says, and knows immediately, refusing to look.

Yes, he imagines Edward’s eyes are screaming, the tilt of his body, the closed expression that speaks just as open, there is another option. There’s always another option. It just isn’t the one they want. He voices instead, “They have control of the playing field, whenever I’ve fought—I’ve always been younger and less than everything person I’ve faced, it’s never been truly fair, because life never is that simple. But, despite that, I crafted the bored to my advantage, spoke them in circles, kicked them until they learned to stay down. But now...they’ve been manipulating the bored since it was first made, for fucks sake. They’re strong, Ling.”

“There will always be strong enemies,” Ling says.

“I know.” A snort. Edward ducks lower, that looks so wrong, reserved for the splintered moments cracked like windowsill glass that’s never fixed. “I’ve been kicking at ‘em since I was twelve.” It looks to sad, and Ling’s hands jerks to do something. He pushing it down, stomps on it, holds in down on his tongue and makes his presence just that warmer.

“When I was six,” he starts, mind screaming: don’t let this loose, you can’t tell him this, anything but this—and heart screaming to a more thunderous percussion: he understands, out of the fifty million he could have fished from way out of depths in this strange country mazed by immortal iniquities and countered cover-ups, is Edward. _Ed gets it_ , his body sings. _You can tell him_ . _You can trust him_. He breaths.

“The third assassination attempt of my life had just been thwarted and the closest dance with death I’d ever had in my entire life. Up until then I didn’t even know people had been sending killers after me—but looking back I suppose it makes sense. Why we were no means the clan with the most jewel, we were proficient enough to be rich in certain luxuries.

“My mother—I was crying, I remember—and my mother, she was holding me and I couldn’t stop _crying_ . Saying over and over a _nd over_ , ‘I don’t want to die’ and—” those breaths stutter, Ling grips Edward’s hand harder and tighter, anchoring the lapse, the calibration— “‘I don’t want to kill anyone’.” Ling drags a hand a little too stiff to be pure flesh by each pad and claw along the point of his scalp. Must be tugging a little to hard, because there’s someone softer and another stone smooth taking reassurance into their own palms, rattling. _I get it_ , Edward seems to say in words he could never articulate. Ling’s heart lurches, treacherously. “And, and she told me,” he chokes out, “told me, ‘choose one’.”

Edward’s eyes are wide as suns. “ _Oh god_.”

“You can guess,” he whispers, “which one I picked.”

His mouth works uselessly, a yawning hole that no words seem to fit. Fiercely, with that same vigor he gets through his brother and childhood friend’s name whenever they cross his lips, he says, with fever, a mishearing of what might have been love, and everything overflowing past the brim, “ _Ling_ ,” and Ling takes a moment to selfishly swoon.  

“ _Ed_ ,” he returns back again, twice as strong. “I decided to live then, I refuse to let than be in vein now.” Adamant about letting the blood soaked through callous knuckles that had went to strengthen the structure barring his heart. Refutes the prospect of failure because he’s been faced with impossible before in everlong snakes and life, stared down the toothy grins with gnarled underbites. “What is left to lose if we have lived through hell?”

There’s no bare sliver of white on Edward’s grin, just depressed dimples turned downward with a broad look that brings a ton of stuttering qualities to Ling’s treacherous heartsong. He nods. “We’ll win.” From their angry tangle, Edward’s fingers curl tighter speaking all the things that don’t fit right in his mouth to be said. _You’ll save your home fighting tooth and nail. No sacrifice in this conquest will have been in vain._ He’s unbelieving and unwilling, but is more scarce to ruin the moment in all it’s soft corner aspects. It’s not a promise, but as Ling turns his chin, let’s his eyes follow and _stay_ , it’s enough, for now.

A whistle shouts.

Edward jumps feet away and Ling jolts back to an easy heart rate at the shock spitting hair from his face in a desperate swivel to see where the noise had pierced from. “The train,” he says with dawning horror.

Then again, like it’d never been severed, Edward’s hand is knotted again in Ling’s loosening his shoulder from his socket with sharp pulls that have them tumbling down scaling walls and alleyway drafts until they’ve emerged forest front at the sound of another sharp whistle. He shouts: “C’mon if we don’t get on this train we are so utterly _fucked_!”

Their legs pump faster in poor rhythm. Ling finds, he can still he whispers of the town music leafing through past the wind whipping violently against his cheeks. He sees blonde and black and bulky profiles figured towards them on a car with opened square holes, waving them faster.

 _Choose one_ , his mother told him once in that void way, brittle and ice honed when she dared the eyes of the devil and let him court her to his bed and guided two claws to settle that left scars still ugly purple at her hips.

Wildfire has never been him, providence saved for the ruthlessness of Greed’s avarice, candle flicked want portioned over for his, but that want of yellow spark; that want of hands and voice thick; that want to be told he can take and take as his own; that want that storms through him in a storm hot and burning, of lifting hellfire and knowing he can drown in the clamor of tsunamis.

It’s been a rolling battle to bottom deep the moment he started carrying that torch for Edward and couldn’t snuff it out no matter how chocked. Edward who rambles about long dead  alchemist in mutters with a keen understanding of the moth bitten pages embedded in him. Edward who grins honest in three ways, flushes first at the ears then travels down neck at the return of caresses genuine. Edward whose filled to the brim with love and adoration and gentle eyes overflowing to the human nature.

That want, colossal and ablaze, is Edward’s fingers clasped between his own, following him down a hill and racing up a chance that huffs from the train’s tender to start charting tracks.  

 _Choose one_.

Deftly, he thinks: _I choose him._

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

He’s shivering with furious fever; cold seeped through the suit of his jacket, blood formed to frozen ice-cubes, arm and leg a silver snow storm bolted tirelessly to his each socket. The forest breach had been cold, this train car even colder and Edward has turned blue and purple under it’s harsh blush all against his skin.

Ice, he recalls with a scientific sort of fascination dosed deadly with fear, is dangerous. And just as in shadow to fire. Because at age twelve he learned fire in all it’s destruction, a pillar of light and heat that pushed against him in waves, eating with soft lips flickering lovingly on all the surfaces of his childhood home. He saw the ashes laid out in a path like rose-petals, the pages not bringing forth the true force of genocide in all it’s embers, a murder around the face and at age thirteen he fears Roy Mustang even more than he did at eleven.

“I’m cold as hell. This place is like a fucking refrigerator,” Edward whines, systematic shudders and shutters slamming his against the iron walls every three seconds, jerky and bringing a more painful cramp that aches lowly. His head ricochets off it, a headache embedding itself in a large blooming bump. There’s a list in his mind already with about ten other things he could complain about, his hover red ports, for one. Another: the lack of binder made up by baggy shirts because his chest cries wolf with so much as breathing. But, with a quick recon, Heinkel looks annoyed enough as it is so he just sticks agreeable with the communal thing of cold biting them all in the ass. “It’s _freezing_.”

“Here,” Heinkel says, holding out a hand clasped around something crumples. Smoothing it into his own clammy fingers, Edward skims over the disgruntled him from twelve-years-old then, mulish and all child-soldier in the split second moment of the flash, thinking. “Something to make you warm and fuzzy inside. Another update on your wanted poster, kid. This time they decided to dumb down a little and try finding a blonde wearing a jacket.”

He huffs. “That’s about a seventh of the population in Amestris. Idiots. Guess they really aren’t that invested in trying to catch me though, which is great news for us, but still.”

“Well?” asks Heinkel. “What are you going to do?”

“ _This_ is the reason why I bought so much hair dye,” Edward stresses, fumbling, pockets patted down along hasty order. Comes up with a vial and blanches, complentive. “Here, pass over a bit of water.”

From a side pocket Heinkel pulls out a green thermos with pretty colors and designs swiped hastily from convenience store shelves in place of a red one that Greed didn’t let them hear the end of. He says, “Don’t waste it.”

Edward rolls his eyes thickly, taking it without grace. He isn’t—misuse has never been a code part of his genetics. Finally though, reaching back the piled bun spills in clunky knots and airborne flyaways and a stubborn cowlick that never settles, pulling a hand out from running his part line pads of his fingers come away a film of grease with a tired grimace.

He pops open the cap, tilts to cylinder till water rivers into it, then set both down with a scowl as the train bounces cheerily. Black ink drags around slowly stirring as he pours in the dye from his vial letting it sink and dissolve, first, before guiding the ends of his hair to it’s edge A clap, and it’s gone. Black hairs gets in the way of his face.

The way it touches, tendrils the color of soot shouldered off and down the scarred skins on each side—one right rich gray alloy, another left changing pinking flesh thrumming with an undercurrent of icey blood—makes pins and needles crawl the length of his skin, vanity and something more boiling white hot at the bottom of his gut. He fidgets as if fire ants follow a line march perfect in the layer under toughened vellum.

It snags something carnal; he’s never been one for change. The first time, though, when it was a necessity inter-midst a grand plan sparked by a deep gutted frown towards some Lieutenant Colonel smacked offset in middle east, Alphonse had said, “And I was right,” helm titled, gaze blank. “Red is not your color, brother.”

“Fuck off,” Edward said back, pushing fingers in cherry-blush hair. Crimson and poorly done dye hadn’t help the case of sunlight catching a few flyaways of leftover gold, but in the end it had done its job getting him into the gang’s base to leave well enough alone.

“Oh, I’m not just talking about the hair,” said Alphonse, and Edward had been unable to keep his eyes from rolling down, slinking like a flea-bitten cat denied an ear scratch back away with a sniff pointed up and muttering, “Ungrateful brat. Has no sense of style.”

Before eleven, twelve, and thirteen he knew how to domesticate and house a flame, the hearth that settles soft like home inside his little brother familiar. Alphonse might be dangerous in the same way ice is, a slow consuming black hole that craves and starves and can shatter the glass-like cover before they even realize they had been walking atop a frozen lake. But, for Edward—he’s warm, stored away inside of him that night with Edward’s arm and blood a piece of home before its peril, stashed it in a hoard with giant gauntlets not used to carrying something that delicate, hands of a greedy orphan that has to keep everything close to his chest. A mirror twist of the same way he’s clutched to Edward, and Edward’s clutched to him.

He’s never felt that solace in anyone else from outside the crop-circle of Resembool (his mother—and while she had been the summer and sun, memories were closer to fuzzy dosage of nostalgia that something palpable to touch; then Winry all man-made, taking forgeries and stone into her own like a miracle, was always a loud presence that felt healing), but Ling’s laughter—loud and bright like everything else about him and not in the least bit cruel—follows him hotly on every escape out. His ears always burning hours after.

It’s not a shallow level adoration and admiration, appreciation through it all because even the worst of them where fascination to a specific, scientific point where the problem provides something more curious. He knows this, can understand how people can be beautiful with different mix-matches of shapes and sizes (doesn’t get it beyond that initial spark, but that’s easy enough to face his back to). But this is affection at its worst.

Ling is a star in the nebula. The one you can’t look at too long without ruining yourself over.

Edward blinks, and his right arm aches and the skin stretches and his shoulder cracks but still it’s not enough and he can’t reach his brother as dissolves in fizzes of light and sparklers in a mess of transmutations marks for the stage of destruction.

Edward blinks, and Nina grins doggish, Elicia is asking him questions small fingers finding and tugging on his arm of automail.

Edward blinks, and he and Ling are fighting tooth in nail and there’s the taste of copper on his tongue and the egregious sea shines that crimson made ruby of philosopher stones that dumb princes cross deserts to find and he might become one of those lost, aching souls. Tiny hands, big hands all palm at his head, tug at his feet in livened agony inbetwixt afterlife and brethren. The pull him under until all the eye can see is  _white_ and he’s forced to breath again that whistled through his teeth.

Edward blinks, and he’s counting the number of the ribs he can see on his brother and a voice whispering  _your fault_ , child-small hands stained fully in ink tear him bodily from his brother and he’s  _useless_   _again_  against them.

Edward blinks. White spots dance across his vision and he shakes them off like snow before he turns too cold. Black hair falls in way of his eyes. He nudges it back behind his ears.

Ling’s all ridges and cliffs, hardened edges softened from the waning ocean side, desert brunt skin alive and jeweled gold in liquid moonlight spilling effortlessly. A map of unexplored plans and valleys  _there_ in his reach but dangerous that makes him all the more enticing because Edward’s always been a reckless soul, and this boy of royal gems from a land that planted itself resolutely in loose living desert sand and  _survived_ is on a different war path with immortality and victory flashing colors wine and blood red in his eyes is bound to end up in the hurt of being impaled (again).

He’s fire as a blazing star and Edward has never been able to help himself from flying too close, getting his hands to warm. It’s only a matter of time before he crash and burns.

(Again.)

 

**_________**

 

Edward trips in the wrong place, on the wrong person—and with it topples dominos, with their crashes and clamors leading them into this mess that, honestly, is more trouble than for it’s worth.

He knew that he shouldn’t have been wandering like this (no matter how ingrained it is inside him), to the lesser parts of towns with work poor in wage but rich in hours, but he finishes getting his share of supple and catches whisper of misdirections of a library blown the wrong way on the wind. He  _knew_   _that_. It isn’t time due to leave back with his other vagabond travel company, so without consciousness his feet drift, a distant part of body and mind, haunting. He also knew he should have been more careful.

Villagers bustle, a couple throwing eyefuls of resentful looks to the cuff of his nice coat, the lapels of his shift buttoned high to his Adam’s apple. Running to yards that stretched and blur into more yard, grass hooks and drags holstered up on their shoulders.

“I don’t like it,” Winry had said to him, shedding her shirt, sweat-worked and pinned to skin, not at all shy in her nudity. They had grown up side by side under the same nurture, and besides, Winry knew, albeit by guesswork and vague evasions, of his trysts struggling with anything romantically sexual. Still, he’d averted his eyes politely. “I thought you were the People’s Hero. So why the hell do  _the people_ still fuck your arm up ten ways to Sunday?”

“I’m a dog, Winry,” Edward scoffed, reason enough that in itself, playing with the fraying edges of an oil-stained wash cloth. “That’s alone is plenty for them not to like me.”

Her lips pursed, worried and annoyance feigned at once. “Yeah? I can think of plenty more better reasons not to like you, Ed. That’s a lazy excuse on their part. Just, make sure you’re not so reckless anymore. I don’t need to remake you an arm  _again_.”

He wishes he had told her more and less in the same moments, wishes he could choose one or the other, that they weren’t planted species that could coexist in the same garden. In his essence, Edward knows he an attention-hungry, road-traveled gremlin, greedy for things he isn’t deserving enough for yet. He wishes it were that easy.  

“Oi, check this out boys,” crows a man who flips him around by the wrist, wearing what must be the customary girth and angry smirk around here, hulking and tall and with a peacock feather tattoo pulling his face from cheek to the skin above his eyebrow. “We gotta a townie.”

Immediately offended, Edward’s nostrils flare. Underneath his skin, the urge to hurt and hit thrums with it’s full force and he has to bit it down past his lungs. “I don’t want any trouble,” he forces himself to say instead, because they’re suppose to keep low profiles and lower heads in places like this, keep palms down on the cards, and Edward will be damned if Greed has something more to hold over him.

“Y’all hear that?” feather tattoo jeers. Edward looks up. Into the criminal’s darkened face, those ice burnt eyes that bit into his skin in ways that crawl uncomfortably, the line of his nose crooked in a way he wasn’t born into and plumish on almost every bit of his leathery face. “Brat saying he don’t want trouble. Fucking adorable.” Alcohol wafts, and Edward remembers foggily sitting pencil straight in an office of East City, Mustang on the bad days with a dangerous fire made up in his eternity, the smell of something sad hitting like a wave of heat in full force. “Pence. Go on, have fun a little with ‘im. Show how we ain’t any trouble.” His teeth and crooked and yellow and all too big for how his lips stretch unnaturally ear-to-ear, gums pink-purple and vomit roaring.

Aw, fuck.  

Pence—a brawler with a face crafted by showmanship fights and cruel toss up of the genetics, muscles rippling, elastic stretchy shirt for show and intimidation of glowering forearms—approaches with slow bull-like movements. His shadows swings past, spilling over Edward.

Edward forces himself still, foot jerked minuscule, not taking that step back from chest to lower abdominal with the grunt. Refuses to show himself down because that’s when they hit you harder and laugh about it. Dares off a challenge, wild and animalistic in one, in his gaze unwavering that pricks something comfortable behind his eyes. There’s a moment for that, left registering.

Then, quickly but not as fast as Edward’s seen moved before, not fast enough that he can’t dart and avoid, rotate by the heel and dodge, a meaty fists goes swinging. Pence’s checkpoints are predictable, coming at him with a purple-blue grasp by the pads of his fingers on Edward’s forearm, bruising him with a swing right to the apple of his cheek, and going down quick with a swipe at Edward’s jelly-gone knees.

 _Fuck_ , Edward thinks again, with vigor.  _I can’t believe I’m letting myself be taken down by a guy that punches as weak as Mustang._  

He doesn’t make it to the ground.

A new shadow moves across the floor, then swallows him up, balm-like. Long, gangly legs spill into his wide sight, golden orbs blinking like a flashlight’s burn, blurring in creamy colors and opaqueness, as he’s jerked by a pair of arms upright—callouses strong and familiar; but touch distant filling his nose with iron, ears with clashing metal point to shield—tugged behind then to the side. They don’t let go.

Greed—in all his deep voice, gut rolling glare, glory—growls, “What the hell is going on here?”

“Nothing,” smoothly says feather tattoo, collecting himself shoulders first. “Was just askin’ that there kid a few questions?”

“So why the fuck was he on the ground?” Greed asks, finger twitching on Edward’s arm, profiled just so he can see how dimples bleed deeper into the scowl.

“Kid’s a smartass,” says the man, dismissively. “Needs to get a handle on that tongue of his before he really goes and bites it off. Just decided to teach him a little thing or two. No harm,” shrugs feather tattoo.  

“Uh, yes harm,” Greed says, as if it’s the dumbest thing that could have come from the crooked mouth. He sounds like he biting down on barely contained anger, Edward realizes with a start. “This  _kid_ is  _my_ property. So if I were you I’d take your hands off him before you lose them.”

The feather tattoo pulls taut, washing duller, a color wane-gray, like ocean shore rocks, against the stretch of his all-toothed smile. “How can ya prove we even touched him? Could be that you just got yourself a real clumsy kid.”

“You don’t get to go insulting my things.”

“We do when we’ve got you surrounded, bastard,” says the feather tattoo, taking a few steps back still facing front wise, his eyes shining like a dare, throat bared in a threat. “So how about we do this civilly? Take it down to the den for a game. You look high strung, could do with a break, yeah?”

Greed’s upper lip curls cruelly. It must be strange, Edward finds with a jolt of starstruck clarity, for the man to be going against with wit and spite to go against what's dressed like a teenager—no matter how much Ling had sprouted, grown out of his aged looks with a matured face that brims with dangerous child mischief ready to bit. “Fuck yes I could do with a break. What we playing for then?”

“Your kid, if I win. Throw in four thousand or so cens, too. And if you win—” the feather tattoo man shrugs, quirks the end of his mouth all brilliant and cocksure— “well we’ll just have to see.”

Greed folds his arms over his chest, but Edward see the clench in his fists anyway. “See we shall, you pissant. Well? What we waiting for? I’m about to send you to the ground to rot.”

The man doesn’t turn his back, not until he’s got Pence and added on another four grunts—one awfully squirrely, two who could have been Pence’s younger siblings, the last with eyes that sparkle with an irking smile—which is telling, Edward observes, smarter than he had seemed before, to not show his open marks to enemy, no matter how young Greed looks or Edward is. They’re not going to be taken with a feather lightness.  

When they’ve mostly bored of their acknowledgement, Edward snags and fistful of Greed’s coat. It tears, under the strain of angry iron. “What do you think your doing?”

Greed’s face doesn’t worry. “We can take them,” he says, assuredly.  

“You,” hisses Edward, “might be bulletproof but I’m not.”

One brow raises, almost condescending but not quite reaching there high enough, as Edward tracks the little shifts fixing their way on Greed’s expression. He says, “Simple fix then. Just don’t get shot,” and turns away before he can receive the full scour of Edward’s snarl. “Also don’t lose, kid, else the plan won’t go according.”

 _I hate him_ , Edward thinks, stumbling after dumbly.  _I’m going to bury him, I’m going to trip him off a cliff, I’m going to pour a carton of flesh-eating rats on his head, I’m going to chain him to the bottom of the largest lake._

 _You’re just being dramatic, brother,_ chides the Alphonse in his head. That sits like an angel growing devil’s horns on his shoulder.  _So filled with that reckless anger. Where would that get you? How would you even go about on finding flesh-eating rats anyway?_ And Edward sees himself as twelve again when that reckless anger was spilling at its highest from all of him overflowing and brimming like red, already parsing a scheme together rubbing his knuckles and palms with a grin softly manic.

The Fullmetal Alchemist, people would whispers over foaming top jugs and oak-wood tables, can slip out of any grasp, military or thug. Can snatch and take, and give and offer. The title more of a ghost that followed Edward and Alphonse too large to be filled by half put together brothers, a word as flappable and shadowy like any other, but one they forged steely. People were bigger with huge and had knuckle ends, so Edward learned how to weave spins and doges, with tight sewn secrets and too good promise. How to craft them just the right rabbit trap like he did on Yock Island, when he and Alphonse were younger and dumber in over their yellow tuft heads.

Manipulation and trickery weren’t tongues often used in Resembol, but Edward had always picked up as a fast learner. Lying through his all-tooth smiles. Wears fraud charmingly. Raveled mettle and nerve sits right hand at the bow of the man with the feather tattoos shoulders, dresses himself with it in strides, like a challenge, as if a threat, bared opened in the circle of hunched over many, as Edward’s eyes taste the luxtate and blood he pretends in, and thinks, this man is not a killer. Just an in over his head thug, of pieces and personalities Edward’s seen a million times over again half sleep deprived, mildly theorizing what array could be used to separate the different components of stem cells and put together back again in different alignments, all beaten boardly.

 _How are you going to play this one, brother?_ the Alphonse on his shoulder whispers. Looking up Edward sees dark colors and a sign that says:  _THE LAMB AND SNAKE-TAIL_.

Walking in, the bar is an empty pocket of cold noise and amber-swept lights, patrons meddled up along the stretch of the bar and saddled in small bubbles of poker tables. He hears the snibbits of whispers that don’t translate all the way, instead a white noise, like the left on radio talk show Alphonse insists on whenever they turn tails back to the cobwebbed dined dorm room with arms full and thoughts aching from unnoticed hours taken by the library confines. A single unlucky employee walks night shift, running simple patterns along oddly lined open pathways. Moonlight is locked out, too tall peek-in windows lined like rectangles closer to the ceiling are curtained by the bare-threads of red ribbons, braiding by a gaudy garlin goldish color, muddy and dull after a second of really looking at it in the time is takes Edward’s gaze to sweep full-stock inventory.

His head divots towards the telltale sound of the scrap of a chair leg, swiveling out.

“Over here.” Feather tattoo waves them over, his jacket prints rippling over the back of his chair with a sharp flap of circulating airflow. He snaps that last employee by his dragging heels to attention. “Come on, go get us set up. Keeping our guest here waiting is bad manners, y’know. You ain’t being paid for slacking, boy.”

“Classy,” Edward murmurs to Greed ironically, running the table over with his eyes. He just snorts showily, now stalking across the room, peacock pride and lion’s lament in every step.

When they’re all sitting and situating, Edward makes a list, going: we could have transmuted gold, to get them to leave well as well. But that draws closer attention to unchecked wild, peering eyes that match a little to much with the younger but mostly same faces stamped on the bottom of large, hungry bounties. He thinks, we could fight, only if it didn’t circle back the attention of town-stored MPs more than a quiet under-table gamble ever would.

“Now,” announces feather tattoo, “no dirty dealing, else we’ll have to cut a few fingers, ‘kay? Get set up. We full bets or half?” He looks to them.  

“Full,” Greed responds in a drawl, half lidded gaze and moving to lounge with purpose sprawling out on a wooden chair, legs origami folded in ways that can’t be comfortable.

An eyebrow hikes, as feather tattoo levers himself into his own seat. “Confident aren’t we? It pays well for brats like you to learn humility young though.”

“I hardly think you’re an appropriate teacher,” Edward mutters rigidly, crossing his legs.

Feather tattoo’s expression glints. “Don’t go—”  

“Enough yabbing,” Greed complains, head thrown back without reverence, a his eyes flit between the two like he’s polishing together a particular difficult puzzle. “I wanna get to the part where we actually play the game.”

“Agreeable. Men have a seat. Ogden—” he gives a tilted nod towards the dealer who shuffles in arching rainbows, falling like waves in practice— “serve us up our cards, and let us finally begin bartering for the boy and your coin.”  

Greed thinks for a contemplative moment in a way that looked like it would go with a bit lip and sheepish narrow slitted eyes. “The boy and our coin,” he says back.

“Dick,” rumbles Edward, picks up the card set Ogden daggers out. A six of diamonds in his left hand, KING in large bold on another. One three and two fives, Edward knits in a grip vice-like. Greed’s nose twitches and he narrows on Edward, vocal ears picking up everything unhelpful missed by the crowd. Ah. Well, it’s not anything he hasn’t heard before.

“Got anything good in there?” says feather tattoo, thumbing at the pristine corner edge of his.

“No.” Greed peers at his hand, and visibly darkens. “Three fours and a six and nine aren’t that great.”

“HA! Get yourself a better bluff there laddie! I put everything in right now!” a Drachman accent says, a large-backed, plainly lumberjack man who huffs and rocks back his shoulders like mountains. He gives in his cards, and everyone else passes around theirs in exchange.

Edward spins his gaze in a slow hook around, to absorb the group at its fullest. With one grip he shuffles his cards, eyes flickering down momentarily. At the feels of eyes on him in the backburner of his mind he wipes clean his face immediately.

When Greed huffs quiet across from him, he’s got on the worn expression of a five-year-old who got the worst piece of buried candy scraped up from his fingertips brushing the bottom of the bucket. His grip begrudging.

It comes alive again, that burning and bitterness back in all his piping and wiring, down to the core.  _I hate him._

Edward thinks about how he’d been ablaze in his warpath down Dublith’s streets, nooks and crannies, and met the before Greed’s glowing gaze, in that back hit wall, honest and open in the way his lips unfurled cruel. True in his sticky hands that couldn’t help but snatch something shiny and rumored mythical seen through in his brother. True in his intents, exploits, and wit. Growing up raised with the roof of a den of liars over his head, he’d taken his morals scavenged hard-earned and kept them with all the rest of his want.

Edward realizes with scrutiny, Greed’s prognostic rule of no lies does, in fact, transfer to talk of the cards. He’s an honest impairment, through and through, looking at him too knowing with a single arched eyebrow.

“So what  _are_ two kids like you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with us northerners?” feather tattoo’s asking when Edward tunes back to conversation.

Greed jerks his chin. With awkward ease, he slots himself back to the midst of conversation, face flickering, twin with something, someone else (something like  _Ling)_ , soft but cut-edge in a bladed meld between the two before winking out all together leaving no remnants of a ghost expect for a demon come back from hell again. “I ain’t no kid,” he says, an all tooth grin absolutely  _wicked_.

“Really then?” says the feather tattoo man, all mock-surprise and play-worthy condescending. “How old are ya?”

“A few centuries,” Greed huffs primly as he can’t be parading a snarl, voice pitched low and conspiratorial.

“A few months,” Edward whispers more-so to himself, as Greed picks him out from the other side of the table again with the tunnel vision and ferocity, that Edward starts to suspect that he might just be even less human around the tough cookie-cutter edges than original found.

Abruptly, Greed says, “I’m goin’ all-in,” slapping the cards tear-worthy hard on the table surface, shining a winsome grin through his barbed teeth.

“As with me,” tuts out a baritone player to Edward’s adjacent, under and out his square-bar mustache. Feather tattoo brows knit together, taking stock of the table, eyes up and down on everything like a hillside. Edward frowns, giving a minor adjustment to his right linen lapel of the button-up he squirms in.

 _Don’t lose on me, kid, else the plan won’t go according,_ Greed’s voice intones colorfully and Edward wants to shout,  _No fucking shit._

Instead, he hums in a way that makes his presence smally known, just in case anyone turns to see what the two brats in over their heads think they can pull from nothing. But they don’t select their sights on him, though, rather instead as Greed rifles his deck with done-before order trace his fingers, from their bends and odd angles, ungrowing nails and the authenticated nicks in Ling’s porcelain. As if if the look hard enough he’ll spill all the eggs from his basket and feather tattoo can wrap up the night neaty.

Like if out of the two of their night and day duo, it would be him—made up all of loud talk and even louder actions, smirks a bit cocky with a whole lot of upper lip salted in—and not Edward working at the grooves of the games cylinder mechanics old aged, dealing out practiced tricks with a sharp ease. Central maybe, but he’s sure it was East city when he’d handpicked the dollar stack of playcards eyeing it as simple entertainment for day long train trips assigned on fancy military grade papers, sitting himself across from Alphonse after they’d pile themselves with observations at the fleeting sights, a first love awed at all doe-eyed, then slipping out cards as per. How Alphonse had won the first few—he’d huffed proud, banging lightly on his metal plating where a heart would like if he weren’t empty as a tin man, saying, “Helmets make for a good poker face, brother. Maybe you should get one to help cover up your face so people won’t be so scared when we go places,”—all of that stretched across whatever duration of the week until twelve-year-old Edward dragged down to a bar, getting strange looks that then glinted warily at the first flash of his newly nicked at pocket watch, and watched.

He would sometimes stick his head in there little gathered games, never drawing up to much time, but enough to start finding his own way around a perfectly still-shock expression. Hemmed swatches of his jacket sleeves mad for good hiding, the thin mouth slivers in his automail even more unsuspecting. Bottom end folds to top corner most scratches never noticed, and when Alphonse had finally found out chasing him around a city square and a half they stilled played bordly (anything, at the time, to get those haunting eyes to stop from fading, almost as if a real ghost, Edward has never said, scowling at it).  

“A full raise, six-hundred chips in the center,” the dead-eyed dealer says pleasantly skimming the deck.

But only now, Edward is still young, younger looking than Ling crowed by Greed, and people haven’t changed so much from looking down on him, so he’s learned the bitter taste of pride by heart since swallowing it so many times years ago and leaves his eyes heavy like a promise through his lashes up at Greed.

Minusculely, he nods.

“I want all in,” Edward says, so perpetually that sounds like a whiny child even to his own ears, shoving forward a tower of chips. Some give a polite good-nature laughs at him, all cruel and bitten. Edward scowls.

“Well I’ll bite. Put me in, too,” feather tattoo chuckles, five chip stacks pushed forward.

“You really wanna do that?”

“Yer bluffing, kid,” feather tattoo says, sudden snapping out his cards like a feathered Xingese fan. Four nines and one five, the Drachman lumberjack and others are throwing theirs down a lot of bit angry, flustered. Greed ooos under his breath with pupils enlarged to dinner plate size. He rolls his shoulders snug and then juts his chin towards Edward, expecting. And, well, it can’t be helped. Edward touches up his face cracked up on casual derisiveness.

“Am I?” He flexes a fist against his hand. Turning it over, big and embolden in it’s four titled Jacks, and single seven. Says innocently, arching a brow, “Guess I did take a few notes after all. Funny that.”

Silence. Everyone grinding their teeth on it, biting into the meat of the after the fact in lost. It’s a live wire, the tension seeping in, action so imminent, alight in every dimming corner of the trashy little bar, that only Edward sits on it and waits against the growing ire.

The dagger brought to Greed’s chest-bone isn’t even a half-suprise, just bated anticipation that’s been crawling like clockwork up his spine at the first flash of unappreciated fangs directed a little to close, rubbing just a way that’s wrong. Volatile. Bloodying, even. They’re scared, Edward realizes with a lungful of breath. They can tell, the inhuman from what’s bleed in different shades, feel it grating like a second skin, getting eyefuls of those too sharp teeth and too pointed pupils that read an open book but in langues they’ve never learned.

(Only—Edward has always been a scholar and a study, and he wonders what that says about him, that he can glance over every inch of the possessed body and tell the aberration.)

Greed raises a single brow. The picture pinnacle of calm composure. Edward doesn’t twitch.

“Just what do you think you’re doing here?” feather tattoo hisses nose-to-nose and bumping Greed’s own, as golden eyes snag and stay on every movement. His stare flicker to Pence, who holds the dagger in patient place, looking dull awaiting the next command order. Feather tattoo is not a killer, Edward calls on, but Pence has the dried blood of others under his rough bitten nails.

“Well I thought I was playing poker,” Greed says, and held knife-point moving to the jugular while being looked down on, he still manages the arrow toothed condescendingness that seems trademarked.

“Well here lemme lay out the problem. What I see, is a couple of young, stupid cheats in over there head. Lookin’ for a good time, walkin’ on our terf and all that,” spits feather tattoo. With his palms, he braces himself, snatching a knuckle-fill of wrinkled shirt, pressing Greed closer, Adam’s apple dangerously so against the shape of the dagger. “Around here, we don’t let young, stupid kids get away Scott free. Like I said, we teach people lessons not to mess with us.”

“Fascinating,” Greed says, so obviously not enthralled. “Should I be taking notes?”

“Shut your mouth now or we won’t make it so quick,” growls feather tattoo, eyes flickering up to Pence then to Greed who babbles on imperiously: “I’ve never really been all that great at test so, heh, fair warning there—” which just makes things worse, taking up every leftover ounce of restraint Edward has buried deep down not to run his hand down his face, so feather tattoo bloats colorfully and snaps, with urgency, “ _Pence_.” The point smooths over that same notch on the throat where it’s hovered and played and frolicked butterfly-like, the place where a blood vessel bursts and fizzles, and Edward must be so far gone, nodding off in the less than challenging game, he blinks and sees Ling. A cut throat. Criminal dagger. Bloodying, even.  

He swallows at that and flashes his eyes towards Greed again, chasing out the remaining hair-pin spinning white spots, just in time to see the air turn something meaner.

“Don’t look away now,” says feather tattoo, turning on Edward. “C’mon kiddo, keep watching.”

“Hurt him and I’ll start screaming,” Edward says with a breadth of utmost calm. His nails bury into his palm fleshy. The material of his pants, of the table, of the air and surroundings all feel like nails on a chalkboard as if a physical touch.

A few exchange worrying glances, a lot never seem to expect the unbridled anger he stores deeply. Greed’s eyes blow wide, almost untraceably, never betraying from his statue-still impression.

“Oh, don’t worry. I love it when they scream,” feather tattoo says languidly, tongue tasting his lip halfway to maniac, and a damn good actor too, because Edward sees the tear of sweat doll down his shirt collar. It’s coldly cruel, with a gleam of hesitance. A slip in appearances.

“Kinky of you,” says Greed, smirking cocksure.

“Pence!” grits feather tattoo, with color flooding angry across his face storm-like. At his orders, Pence smoothly follows a half-a-second through.

“Don’t!” Edward protests, snapping to his feet. It sounds like begging.

Everyone turns to him dangerously. Godless alchemy, poolfuls of a golden gaze, an arm and leg not quite right under bunches of coats and shirt sleeves are pulled up in rightful suspicion, but the human from inhuman is all too obvious. Unable to kill what’s never been alive, except. Edward stares at Greed. Except, he thinks, curiosity tickled pink by the spike of panic that tends to come unwanted whenever a dagger’s turned on an ally.

“Listen kid,” says feather tattoo, his expression folded in dawning frustration, throwing up a thick brow high on his forehead as if he means to scoff silly at some dumb child. “We ain’t playing here. You’d be willing to risk yourself too, to save that filthy heretic?”

Edward’s muscles spasm with barely contained fury. A full blazen. “Do you get off on being a confusing coward that just walks circles ‘round people? You fucking bitch—”

Smooth as silk, dagger makes a clean cut, almost all the way through, before without stop for breath it moves down to the place it hovered before on the chest breaking through bone. One particularly powerful swing—sends Greed’s down. For a horrible, ageless moment Edward wonders if it’s another second-handed delusio from the deep darks of his mind. Dyed organic red at the edges pools in oceans. Suddenly unnerved by the sudden stillness, feather tattoo turns his backside to the slumped posture, Pence drawing up solemn busying himself into working the grooves of the dagger clean with the soft matte-black of his shirt hem, silence spreading like molasses sleep.

Edward’s pulse quivers, he feels a little boneless. Nostalgia stirs, inspires hazy bits of remembrance from the darker corners of deep unconsciousness, played over and over and over again in less details, just as much gore. But he doesn’t look away, wells with the urge and denies it in horror.

He thinks:  _wait_.

“Good,” feather tattoo says, a little flush and a lot of sweat a clean sheen across his forehead. “Darin and Mace get on body duty, I want it spotless here in an hour and no more. Make sure no MPs are curious, they already have us on their watch plenty as it is.” He twists towards Edward. “As for the kid. Well. I’m sure we can make something useful outta you.”

Edward stills there bodily, waiting, waiting, patient there in the tunnel vision on Greed’s bending angles, still warm every from across the distance of the table, like a car’s engine motor heating with energy powering through sparkling just under the casting, swelling until the moment where it bursts in far-flung fire. Intimidation, he knows, as the ungodly red, dark and deep as pomegranates crackles lightning dance across cleaved skin.

“Hey, hey. Don’t ignore me, kid,” feather tattoo says, snapping sharply over sudden bated breaths. Sparks fly behind him, bone following tissue following skin marking up Greed in reserve, stitching up fluidly. Rewinding. There’s horror written clear as day, uppercase on meeting expressions.

Greed gurgles on the blood, coughing and spitting up until he can work his tongue without the lull pasting it to the bottom of his jaw. “ _Damn_ , dying  _hurts_ ,” he groans, wearing shimmering teeth dark with the stuff. A Frankenstein monster of his very own likeness, peeled word for word from horrible things.

“The hell—” Feather tattoo spins, eyes bulging and moon-ish.

Greed goes on, thumbing at the stains of saliva and blood on conservative parts of his jacket, “I’m going to ache all over tomorrow, I’ll have you know. Gonna be even more of a pain in the ass without a proper bed.”

Feather tattoo freezes. Gapes. He says, shaking, “Wha—what are you?”

“Huh?” Greed tilts his head, pouting with a lot of lower lip and faux-guileless staring. Innocently, he points to himself. “Little old me? I’ve been a lot of things, y’know, been called a whole lot more. But right now? Right now, I’m that kid’s boss.”

“A monster,” someone whispers as another joins in with a prayer to a god that has no hand on this game, on the gamble that was made a long, long time ago cultivating into the wine red startling stare, the cage of his ribs out proud, heart and sounds thumping wild a little higher. Pence scrambles again from his knife between butter-fingers.

“And seeing you guys trying to rough him up while he’s being so good minding his own business, and under my current employment no less—really hurts me, gets me right here,” he goes on, pressing a mock-fist to his chest, punctuating a few times the left side a little lower under his shoulder blades but the place above the cavity and heart.

“What do you want?” feather tattoo bites out, a little pasty.  

Some monsters can be merciful, and others swallow people whole all the time, and Greed’s cruel lift of one half of his expression, too oddly cheery is anything but. He leans forward, brings the oppressive weight of his power stemming from sealed bloodline that lowers shivers down the criminals’ spines. Growls, low enough to hear, sharp enough to kill: “Let me lay if out for you. Kid’s mine. Mess with a single hair on his pretty little head, and it’s your body that I’ll tear apart limb by limb first.”

“Fuck off,” says feather tattoo, but he’s unable to suppress a shudder.

Greed raises a single eyebrow, backing away tall. “We’ll be taking our leave now, ya? Goldilocks, come.”

All Edward can do is silently follow Greed away doggish from the stilled-shock men that quiver as Greed gaze swims lazily over their heads. Helpless against the urge, snaps back to himself at the sound of scrapped-sole on floorboard creak. (He’s always been a little shit.)

Bringing down his left heel to the toe of his boot, petty and pleasant with his leave as the man chokes of the raw bile of pain, Edward hisses to the one with the feather tattoo: “Y’all can go choke on a bullet.” His automail creaks, and he makes sure to let the door knock on the wind on the way out.

Greed is there, playing down his shirtfront, fingers fiddling with the two pieces of tear exposing moonlight to the spot raw red. He pinches it together, let's go and huffs as it curls it’s way open again, until finally fed-up he just covers his jacket frustrated with white-knuckles. Blood an iron red is a shock against the speckled white of his collar.  

Edward watches him for a moment, curiously memorized, before darting his gaze a few yards to the size suddenly flush, and asking, “So Ling tell you to do that for me?”   
“God you gotta stop with that, kid,” Greed says, dragging his eyes up Edward. “Maybe I was bored and wanted to see what kind of trouble you dragged up like some unabashed, half-drowned kitten.”

Edward narrows his eyes dangerous. “I could’ve handled it without you butting in like that.”

“You mean you would have let ‘em just wail on you?” drawls Greed.  

“That’s  _not_ what I was going to do,” Edward grits through his teeth, caught red-handed. “Shut up.”

“No. You,” Greed says.

Well, Edward thinks. It’s always been easier to push than pull, argument weeded as something knee-jerk, first on his tongue and ground into his teeth. Particularly masochistic of him, to he honest after a point where he pricks himself on the sharpness. “You did a shit job anyway,” he hisses. “Those idiots probably now think I’m part of some human trafficking rig, or a rising kind of rival group.”  

“I mean. We kinda are, Goldilocks. All the more reason they’ll be keeping some distance until we book it.”

“You didn’t even get anything from that at all.”

“Figured I’d just take whatever you swiped of their persons. So cough it up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Cough it up,” Greed says, expression expectant.

 _I hate him, I hate him, I hate him_ , Edward thinks.  _I’m going to bury him, murder him, stop him,_ he thinks:  _sock him, hit him, kick and scream and don’t back down,_ all the while digging deep in loose leafs of balled-up picked papers and broken bills that watched unguarded. Offering them palm up, he groans irritably, “Ugh. Fine, whatever. Here you go.”

“Didn't take you for a pick-pocketer,” Greed observes mildly, carding through the amount.

“I’m not,” Edward scowls.  

“You totally are,” says Greed breathily. With laughter, Edward realizes as his bottom lip wobbles between two rows of teeth. “I can’t believe how many peasants in this country have such piss-poor attitude. Is it like this all over?”

“Oh like you can talk, bitchface.” Even turned away, jutting his nose with poise as moonlight punches from a long cut cloud and clearing over his face, the rolled eyes is audibly implied.    

“Little brat,” Greed snarls, dutifully tolerating the fire-spark of anger that chokes just as quick as it excited. Edward clamps his jaw sharp on it belatedly. “After I use this body to take over Xing, I’m coming for Amestris next when this Promised Day crap is all over and done with.”

Suddenly, stupidly, and inexcusable, Edward wishes that Darius and Heinkel were there to be a mediator between the two of them (who can sense a dispute a mile off, shrugging the whole fugitives and on the run from the government issues like they were rainwater, way in over their heads but ghosting their hands against the fire anyways), a pull, a clarity for murky depths they can’t wade through, friction between words that leave them floundering and flounderings that leaves them angry. It’s befitting, really, for the two of them to collide in orbit like this; starring an immortal who ran away from home to the broken boy whose house rained ashes, hot on his back as he fled. Deserving, even.

Understanding genuine meanings between vice and virtues in fleeting tones and stone-walled expressions is so far out of Edward’s genetic configuration it’s a wonder he’s gotten this far at all. Greed might be a mock-human, a well masked monster, but just because he falls on the flesh side of the Venn Diagram doesn’t mean shit. So Edward doesn’t hear the faraway wisp that curls from Greed like smoke, some second-hand dreams inhaled in passing. Is blind to the tensions digging in his brows. Blinks and misses a flash of  _something_.

Instead, he says, “Ling’s not just a body. You don’t  _own_ him. He’s his own person.” A breath. Edward’s mouth curls bitterly down to the left. He doesn’t look back.

Greed stares for a moment. His silence loud. “Y’know, I have a question for you. Asking for a friend.”

“What?” Edward says, irritated. Averts his frown to that tear in Greed’s shirt.

“Why,” asks Greed, that shit-eating smiling loud in it, with that belly-deep voice rolling on forked tongue throatily, “did you want to believe the idiot prince was still there, down in that underground? Why do you hold onto that so much?”

There million dollar question, Edward thinks with dried lips and a cracked mouth, and he’s dirt poor at the moment. There’s an easy answer in there, there’s supposed to be a reply rattled off at the ready.

 _He owes me,_  Edward would say— _should_  say,  _the fucker never paid me back for all that room service. Never paid us back for taking him in like a lost stray because Al has always been a soul too good. Never got the chance. That was stolen from him, given away._

Instead it’s—

Because I failed, I failed again and I couldn’t keep up the walls made by pushing myself to fumbling feet and a ragged sound of broken flesh and broken metal made while I ran on those same mismatched legs, Edward thinks. I failed and now I need him, in the same way I have always been a child needing relief.

He’s held on a little too tight, pulled himself a little too closely, let himself have that selfish second of reprieve where he followed the warmth Ling emmits in spirit and body, has always since he met him—a colored poison dart frog wearing bright, ear-to-ear grins that mask a country’s hidden agenda that contours something even more, indiscernible but not impossible.

For someone so averse to emotions, Edward sure has a fucking lot of them. There’s plenty sitting on his tongue tasting so bittersweet that he’s thought about hunched over hostel desks and struck down logs, that he wants to say, to Ling.  _Why did you do that Ling? Why did you leave your country Ling? How have you survived the quiet nights for so long? Was it worth it? Why can’t I make myself walk away? Do you know, you were the first friend I made for years? Why can’t hate you again? Why did you_ leave  _me? Why, why, why, why._ Always scribbled mentally out in angry black frowns that Heinkel glances on invitingly and Darius comments, saying, “Keep your face like that and one day it’ll stick.”

That almost brings a bitter laugh choked up his throat. He swallows it down with everything else, thick on his tongue and slow as molasses as his gaze drops down Greed sharply. Arsehole, he thinks, and hates all this stupid angst over something as pathetic, something he’s consoled himself until the fact was ripped into tiny pieces over again as this.

“That idiot prince still needs to pay me back for all that food he swindled off my pay,” snarls Edward instead, moments too late, as he turns on his heel.

Behind him, Greed  _laughs_.

 

**_________**

 

“Oh,” is said softly from behind raises a hundred hairs along Edward’s arms and spine through honed supposition and lack of watchful red eyes tracking him like spotlights. Ling is a beacon powered by the moon’s half-smile light, silver and standing ridged, blank.

 _Beautiful,_ a part of the sleep daze of cloudiness nights offers. Edward promptly hushes it. S  _hutupshutupshutupshutup_.  

Ling stares and Edward’s been in a million situations plus some of being tracked for every breath, seen how people flicker to study the stillness of his adam’s apple and the climb of his chest in even intervals and the wide eyed gaze he gives to the world unflinching, but this. Ling blinks—must see something etched in his skin that’s betrayed him—hurrying to say, “Oh, sorry. I just noticed you were gone and went to make sure any stowaway MPs didn’t steal you in the middle of the night.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Edward says, shrugging through the iron flare heavy right hand pain and trying not to feel inexpert as Ling’s mouth forms an ‘o’. Tries to roll the tense set racked on his shoulders off, tries to shake the feeling of those one thousand fire ants burrowing back into stiff military track lines.

None of it helps (his stomach constricts, his shoulder screams, his thigh pulses), nothing except time and patience which he’s emptied his jars enough of to wait out the remnants left in disease of faces. So many faces, the worst not even that. He shudders violently. Blinks away the white spots, dancing. Not tonight, he thinks and resolutely looks ahead.

“Ah,” says Ling, coming down besides him feather-light in a way that used to be untraceable but now thrums warm with a power pumping directly under the thin vertebrae of skin. His posture cliffs off like there’s a question he’s waiting for the right push to ask. Didn’t even wait for the inviting pat-pat, palm-to-earth. Rude, Edward tiredly thinks, ignoring the plumeing warmth from a presence not a ghost.

“What about you?” he says before Ling can. “Where’d Greed go scamper off to?”

“Sleep. At least, what’s sleep for him as of late. He doesn’t really need it, but wants it just as much as he wants anything so,” Ling breaths through his teeth, “I get the nightshift.”

“Wait,” says Edward. “You’ve been in control every night?”

“Not every night, just some,” Ling says. “Some nights.”

“Then you could’ve—just, like—” Edward flounders and Ling laughs and Edward flounders some more, fiercely hating himself for that after when his ears burn scarlet and purple under the moon’s slitted eye.

“Don’t strain yourself there, Eddy” he teases. Reaches out to smooth the netted stress in his brow, but Edward flinches back. He stops, and Edward’s heart plummets feet.

“You can’t talk about exploding you brain just by thinking,” Edward says, “and don’t call me Eddy, dumbass,” then with finality and confidence nicked from no experience and lack of a plan, laces that hand back in an angry tangle that presses their palms flush together, and runs the pads of his thumb over unmapped mountain valley’s of each knuckle, his nails sharp and ungroomed trailing half-crescent marks momentarily flickering with blown red electricity before running nicked and smooth again. In same toy-wrapped, authentic condition to just before Greed had ripped into him those months ago like some fucking reborn again gift.

“He’s not so bad,” Ling says, suddenly, with something teetering in the underbite of his tone, clarity bright in the way he glows absolute. Star-like, the wanderlust part of Edward thinks. Stupid, the other half reminds.

He blinks. “Who?”

“Greed. He’s awful and violate and loud with little to no understanding of boundaries, but he really does mean well,” Ling says plaintively, cautioning carefully with the air of a man defusing a bomb. “He just doesn’t always have the best if ways of showing how he cares.”

There’s a million things Edward can say to that, all nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand tripping over one another on make route to his throat. Bile and guilt prevail in thorns and claws. He can’t look Ling in the eyes, averting back to his backhand intertied resolutely with his own. He’s wearing a stolen jacket and all collected layers beneath and it’s still not enough, all too much at once. He’s never been good at this, Edward thinks as the silence cloys and his skin endures, hunching closer in.

Ling just sighs bell-like. His palm drags hotly down Edward’s jacket sleeve, dragging him softly, slowly with it. A single finger points into the sky, bright against the obscuring backdrop, when they've situated themselves belly-up and floating on patchy blushing fields. “There’s the Shí Zi Jià. And parts of the Crane, a few bits of the left side of the Snake’s Head. Draco and Delphini are mostly visible, too.

“There.” Ling compasses at an angle of west and north upward, letting his fists roll out in ease and arm lower back with a muted thump against compact grasses. “Is Astrea, the star maiden. The goddess of justice and innocence. When the earth had become riddled with wickedness and cruel spirits playing under the guise of humans, she decided to leave to the stars and sky, living up there amongst them so she could look down and see when the ceaseless conflicts had ended to return again, one day maybe.”

Edward flexes his hand, knuckles restless and rippling. “What?”

“Constellations. It’s the most I’ve seen since coming to Amestris.” Ling smiles languidly and lazily, head lolling against the soil and sand to spectate Edward. “Your country is awfully polluted, you know.”

He snorts. “In more ways than one.”

“Hm, yes. That is a way to put it, in a twist of irony. But it’s alright enough to spot a few, and I’ve never really been the best at recalling them all. At first learning it was just another tutor passing knowledge added to my regime of lessons before I was kicked to the streets with Lan Fan and Fu. Even now I still remember them despite everything. Stars, astronomy, and all that aren’t even really my favorite subjects,” Ling says, bitter tanging his humorless low laugh. “But it was better than going over merchant pensions for the tenth time in my studies.

“Lan Fan thought it was interesting enough as a way to past time when we lived on the streets. After we’d get free lo mai chi from a kind eyed baker down the street we’d sit on top of Lema’s Temple and look at the sky.” His nose wrinkles, decisive. “I suppose, since so many of the afternoon soaps are based of the constellation stories, that's where my interest stemmed.”

“Really?” asks Edward.

“Yes. Shí Zi Jià, the Crane, Draco, the Snake’s Head, Delphini. Even Astrea’s tell-tale departure from our world as soon as the first blade was pointed on someone else,” he sighs. “Wish we all had that kind of luxury.”

“I don’t,” Edward says, softly, as he remembers, late when exhaustion pulled at his feet in tired, long drags and Alphonse had scooped him up with ease gained from repetition again and again, said soothingly, “I don’t mind the nights as much outside. We really see how small we are, just floating dust-to-dust, memoirs in our own right to the universe,” until Edward had come to again in the next town off that road, hazy in dizzy thoughts of Alphonse’s lull taking by the hand to something not quite sleep. “If I was given it, I don’t think I’d bring myself up to strength ever to come back again.”

“Oh come now,” Ling says, lightly.  “You sell yourself too short.”

Edward kicks Ling in a way that isn’t suppose to hurt. He mumbles, “Don’t,” and Ling laughs too loud, body twisting with it until he’s dissolved in giggles that fade off into white. “I don’t—” Edward works his throat clumsy. Tries again because he’s never known how to stop proper. “My mom once, she, uh, I don’t really remember it completely ‘cause I was, ya’know,  _four_ for fucks sake, but she used to sometimes take me and Al and point up at the sky. Tried to teach us constellations from an old chart the bastard had closeted up, told us stories. We never really got it because we’re little shits whose whole world was limited to Alchemy and I can’t recall the names for shit, but, uh, I think I wanna learn. If you would teach me. That is.”

Ling flips over, keeps hold of their hands together there, but lets the rest do the work, eyes staring him over with working heat that Edward refuses to shy from, emotion more prominent along his lips and brows for any person—the best either of them can do—but Edward isn’t any person. A scholar well versed in circles carrying the notation of power to change the world and  _shift_ , the precise composition of a body of a human down to dot an etched recipe easy as pie, exactly how metal calls to blood in soul-bonded containers. But the look Ling holds him to isn’t equations and equivalence, how his pupils dilate wide as saucers and canthus folds with skin kindly.

It’s mountains uncrossed and lands without charts to claim, and Edward’s breath catches and his heart leaps miles to search those valley, plants, and ridges, and his ears sizzle in cold contact awed.  

Ling’s fingers curl around Edward’s. “Okay,” he says to him, “let’s do that then,” blinks and rolls his shoulders to be front with the reaching skyline again. “I mentioned Delphini before, yes? Well look a little south, then move over west some and it’s one of the brighter stars in that area and that’s the end of her tail....”

It drones into something soft and familiar, reminds Edward of the times were he’d work his eyes to blink some more for another moment to drawl on monotone aimless when Alphonse was trapped and restless, completely captivated by how alien it is, how it warms him and how his arm still jolts with the unused-to affection.

Two seconds. Edward gives himself two seconds. Two seconds undeserved and taken to admire how moonlit drinks in Ling’s presence, casting him a marble-fine statue in bathing shadows and rooted glow. Like the ones Edward’s passed in text, Xerxes myth come alive in animated smiles that pin shapes to stars. Skin god touched and eyes brighter than that.

Then he rolls over and listens as Ling whispers on about a god’s fear in the fragility of wishes.

 

**_________**

 

“Ed!” is the only warning before he’s full-body jumped sent tumbling like how weeds and hay root themselves in endless wandering circles through desert sloped hills, and fuck Edward must be out of it because he’s honed instinct to move and duck through ordered operations and official assignments in the meaning of life and death. It’s easier to think that, than perhaps he’s letting Ling go topple chest first followed by limber arms on top of him, maybe even secretly enjoying.

“Gah, fuck!” Edward says. “God damn it Ling. Where the hell Greed go off to?”

Lopsided and lifting awkwardly in the inopportune held position Ling gives half a shrug. “I’m not quite sure, but I’m here for a while at least and thought we could go around the village for a bit! Have some fun, see the world!”

They’ve been stalled by the larger clumps of homes and farms, tailing them like strays and forcing them to stop to Darius and Heinkel’s obvious appreciation for inside housing utilities, Edward’s concern and paranoia skyrocketing with a more colorful bloom of hair colors blossoming, a ripe evergreen, and Greed’s delight at every turn. With a broad and fluid sweep of a splayed hand, Ling gestures amply to the village they’re stuck at now—more of a crossing merge of city and town, really, an outlier intersection of the few on the grid of Amestris map, chimera all the way through with streets slowly narrowing and roofs topped off stories higher to the sky, shocks of farm life still thriving like weeds through the cracks of cement and peeking alleyways.

“What makes you think I don’t want to just sit in the library here?” Edward mutters, turning head to shy back into the bars of his low hanging bangs.

Ling rolls his eyes. “Oh c’mon. Don’t be a dick, I know you probably already raided the poor place through and through—” and Edward frowns because he did do that already but he doesn’t like being this predictable, especially to  _him_ of all people— ”Anyway it’ll be fun,” continues Ling. “I’ve never had a chance to go out with a friend like this before.”  

Edward hasn’t either, but Ling didn’t need to know that if he hadn’t already observed in reticence observation. “We hung out in the first village,” he says.

“That doesn’t count, Ed,” says Ling. “It was a  _supply run_.”

“ _This,_ ” protests Edward, sputtering, “is a supply run. Darius and Heinkel are out  _running_ for  _supplies_ right as we speak.”

“ _Ed_ ,” Ling whines, and Edward doesn’t like where this was going because he’s always been a weak man, and weak men are susceptible to grinning fools that pucker out their lower lips rosy and red and all pretty like. “Just for a little bit. Then we can hang out here again, but please. I just want to be with someone before I have to leave again.”

The silent stays terse, a visible struggle of reeling emotions that pull Edward’s lips up and down and cross, before. He says, “ _Fine_. You win. But it’s cold and I don’t wanna get frostbite because you were a big baby.”

“Brilliant!” Fluent motions pronounces, shifting and adjustment nonexistent, and Ling bounds on his toes again, rolling up to his full height with Edward pulled along like a halyard. “Quick then! Let’s not waste a second.”

 

**_________**

 

Sometimes, Edward wonders how it must look standing there, their little ragtag group of misfits. Ling with his disarming smile and unshakable wrongness bunking bodies with a demonic partner in crime, Darius and Heinkel poised bulk of group reason in elegant military loyalty-turned-betrayal fashion with a wariness honed to a point by experimentation, and himself, barely hanging on by the rest of his limbs always at the edge of something reckless teetering unhinged by the flesh and steel of his fingers.

They’re a sight seen in comedies, steadfastly stringed together by needle point of gaping loss and reluctant caring swallowed begrudgingly. Hard not to be noticed, even muted with the patterns of gray, black, and white button upped to their Adam's apples all blue-collar like. Maybe their oddity is a drive for ignorance, tricking mind games into normality never sparing a second glance at the travelers seen for no more than a day.

Especially now, with his and Ling’s tour around the streets, intertwined hands stemming from Ling’s cheeky grins and Edward’s humiliated pink, like swinging pendulums creating a five foot radius safety hazard.

“It’s probably the beard, I think personally. After thousands and thousands of years of no shaving whatsoever, with  _that_ facial hair monstrosity that might as well be a furry rodent living on his face at this point, now that’s gotta make any poor old guy go a bit wild. Oh —or maybe, Ed, it’s that his cat got hair all over his favorite sweater. That  _for sure_ has gotta stir up some earthly resentment and grandiosity god complex deep, deep down,” Ling says, keeping up with gestures wild, leftovers of his free hand flying from left to right in a fast paced buzz.

He doesn’t want to let go, Edward finds through red hued fog, palming through it in daze and clumsy inexperience. Always worn that selfish. Crowned it personally. Worn it like silver stained armor, crafting it into limbs to use again. Tastes two kinds of yearnings on his tongue that he’s never known to be familiar with before, feeling at each sword-callous and gap there in between. Glances the kin-shared cress of immortality.

Ling is a wildfire Edward’s body is willing to torch under, to burn with and that—that’s more terrifying in way it’s paved something barring closely to truth. He warms himself by it, palms up and open in basking. Feelings too visceral to be knee-jerk, honed and pegged behind shut eyelids and to the face of shoulder blades to when Edward finally turned and withered in the wave of  _heat_ it gave, he could only shrivel and frown down at all poor tastes in fault on his part. Acceptance was coming too snail’s speed, swallowing molasses as he wonders at the curl of each their hands.

Edward holds on a little more, swings just that bit, biting the inside of his cheek sternly putting his mind back a few places. He says, “He probably ordered a dining set from East City and found out it had a table leg missing after he opened it, and now dreams about Armageddon with dancing sugar plums.”

Ling absolutely  _cackles_ , blotchy red faced looking devilishly gleeful. “Oh  _yes_. Or, or, or Father’s just upset ‘cause he keeps stubbing his toe on that one edge of the coffee table that one of his children moves a centimeter left every single morning.”

Edward thinks: fuck.

He thought it’d be simple, really, the sweetening swell of his heart rescinded it’s offers of something more to be wanted with Ling given enough time, among other facts. He imagines it in the same textbook penmanship of all previous military forms,  _Times New Roman_ font, saying:  _Problem to Solve for the Day: Please Choose One._

_(a) the mass extermination coming due date (also known as; the apocalypse, The Promised Day, time when everything all goes to hell)_

_(b) current military nepotism taut on his pulse-point like a leash_

_(c) retrieval, rehabilitation, and renaissance of little brother’s body, seen malnourished/emancipated_

_(d) all of the above because you’re running out of time and this will all be gone if you can’t get yourself together, idiot_

He’s so,  _so_ tired. Has been for a long time running, hands shaking that slight minute way around every clap, feels like he’s staring down a fire, muscle eating gasoline and air with burnings brighter, bluer to that point, and sometimes it flickers, and he imagines white-hot starburstings. Biting, gnawing, eating at his flesh and steel until his knees are brought to jelly.

He knows all the cruel flames (worked under Mustang long enough, saw that man older than him at the end of his wick but unable to tamper down on all the running hot in the pipes under his skin), but Ling’s is kind and warm and he wants to take it places more peaceful where he can shut his eyes, if for a moment, and curl up along the span of his shoulders—the sky a cast away blanket that fills well endlessly, curving up like a faraway friend.

“You know, this place reminds me of Cardend in a way. Holds a charm similar,” Ling says, drawing Edward back, peeking downtown, “but different, too.” Their hand holding picks up speed, flying up level with there chests. People swerve with clear distaste around them.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

Edward shrugs with his right shoulder. “Well a lot of places outside of cities follow a pretty standard design for efficiency since the farms are really the only things feeding into the circulation of food around Amestris.” He gestures vaguely, arm pulling back down to a hard drop, saying, “This one just happens to be stuck in the middle of a city and town that dabbles with farming.”

“The placed your learned to herd?” Ling asks, and fuck he looks like a puppy, tilting his head and stepping preppy. Fuck, because Edward shouldn’t feel a stone lodged into his throat like this, shouldn’t flinch as his hand warms and clams up, still trying to grasp even as he stumbles so out of his sector. “It was a farm?”

“Not exactly. Resembol in itself was just one giant sheep farm all together. There were a few small wheat fields and stuff out a ways away, for like, food, but besides that we all got our meals and goods from shipments that came in from places like Central and East City.” Edward shrugs, unsure, with waving movements that flutter restlessly with his hand. “Handling the sheep was just a thing that every kid learned. Like the alphabet and tying your shoe. Over there it was common knowledge.”

“Part of the morning routine then, ya?” Ling smiles cheekily into his space, leaning low. “Wake up, make your bed, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, then—oh! Must have forgotten to herd the sheep between brushing your teeth and breakfast.”

Edward snorts, ducking into the warm bubble they’ve made. “No, idiot. We herd the sheep before breakfast.”

“Of course.” Ling’s shoulders shake and Edward can feel how he jostles at every spirit of laughter. “My mistake.”

“So what about you?” asks Edward. “Ever have to rough it out with the hillbillies? Pick up a pitchfork, chewing on a stalk of wheat?”

“I did live off on a farm for a little bit, actually,” Ling hums, lilt thoughtful. “A rice farm, actually. It was after a threat of an attempt on my life was delivered that my clan thought it best to hide me for a few months to see if we could deter their efforts. Never did too much work while I was there, helped out where I could but mostly Fu saw to it the time was used to train Lan Fan and I.”

“Fascinating,” Edward murmurs, airily.

“Fascinating?” Ling repeats, visibly delighted.

“Uh—wait, no I meant—”

“Well what did you mean then,  _Ed_?”  
“Um—” he shivers thickly.

“Oh, are cold? You should have said something earlier. Here,” says Ling, releases the lock on there hands—Edward quickly wiping his sweaty slick one on his pant leg with no more than a little reasonable flush—letting his shoulders slip out from his jacket, sleeves and all proffered onto Edward without askance as he manoverves snatched hands into the limb holes. Last time, Edward thinks looking down at the swatches of black now his worn, he hadn’t realized, how much bigger it was on compared to stretched out along Ling’s own rippling skin. How it paws his hand it large overhung fabrics that limp easily.

Wonders at it, not modal for sure, but close enough to bring in that inch comfying feeling like a mile leaped compared to before. He looks up, to Ling’s dark eyes all owlish, skin unchanging, but, the air around them simmers.

“Thanks,” Edward says slowly. There’s a part of him, that knows he shouldn’t take it, that Ling is uncomfortable and too kind an asshole grown up chiseled that way, granite statue. Edward has a little brother, and an older sister-figure, he knows the ins-and-outs of argument, knows how not to run them nowhere, worse, in circles. But, his body sings beneath it. Body devours. Body dissolves. This is the second time, he thinks with shivery daze, Ling’s given me his coat to wear. His heart jackrabbits in his chest. “You want to—uh—go grab something? To eat? I mean, I’m hungry, I have money, and Lion King and Mr. Gorilla don’t have to know…”

“Of course!” says Ling, enthusiastically. “That’s never even a question for me. And of course, a bonus of the fact you are paying, too.”

And the grin falls back on again smooth like easy rain. Touches something soft, in him. “Asshole. You haven’t even paid me back to last time. Is that the reason you hang out with me? For the free food?”

“Among other things.” Ling winks. Edward ducks his head, ears hot.  _Stupid, stupid, stupid_ , he thinks viciously, and Ling’s snatching up his hand again, already sending them off in some direction, because he’s a compass for food, wired to notice these things in his impaired way of being always hungry that rage in that large standing appetite, mouth moving by a mile a minute with babbling ons to the cross-faced staller decorated in noticeable bright red at an ugly conflict with his food stands even more bright green. Edward looks, picking at his coin, and any and all emotions swell largely.

Oh, he thinks, going back to wondering at their hands, still unsmooth and ridged, fingers warm interlaced with Lings. Let’s his gaze do the work and travel again, knowing Ling can feel it like needles and pins but he hasn’t let go and Edward takes that as an invitation and more, eyeing down everything, to the swinging of his arms, to how his shoulder blades flutter wingless kept up high and broad. A little guilty, he blinks and remembers, never wanting to lose this piece, this handsome and happy open mouth smiling Ling that walks him around and holds him there, in that moment. He thinks:  _never forget_ ,  _never forget, never forget._

“Oh come on, Ed. Feed me, won’t you?” Ling says, when they’ve gone blocks away, laughter slipping like bubbles.

“Yeah? I’ll make sure you get a nice mouthful of my fucking fist,” mutters Edward, head dragged downwards, shadowing the fond upturn of lips. “Asshole.”

That only seems to further enthuse Ling, laughing, brilliant and cocksure. He doesn’t, in fact, wait for Edward to pluck the beef from the spike into his mouth, waving it with one hand and now-full chipmunk cheeks. There’s a smile there, and without permission Edward’s ears start to steam. That same something soft flutters like butterfly wings beats in his throat.

“Delicious,” Ling says around the bite.

“Disgusting,” says Edward, working down the rest of everything. “Chew with your mouth closed.”

 

**_________**

 

There’s a curfew to the town, instructed by soldiers all navy lined and polished dolls with skin a few shades sickly under night’s curtain, actions inspired cruel by the half smile of the moon at the moment after the sun sinks.

The leash they have on it feels more like a noose, than anything, and Edward thinks of Youswell first, with it’s tired shoulders, heavy set expressions, and coal dusted smiles all barring grim; then a small quarry he can’t put a name to that worked indentures clockwork with harsh hands and harsher toil, worse in everything named in likeness to slavery as if  a cousin, with summers dressed more like fall with colorless eyes of dragged adults weightless in size lifting tens of hundreds of ton plus that, brown scabbed children running barefoot with triumphant howls at the tip of their tongues lodged in their throats choking them kindly, beaten back by those blue footed military men but not out. That was the only reason, undercover and worked just as hard for only a small moment sampled from lifetimes there, Edward had spiked a pitch of freedom there, stuck it like a flag in the sand in front of them and watched them devour it with hungry eyes until they up and needs a taste themselves.

The large part of him wants to ignore this nameless town in the now, shuffle his scuffed soles in the sand, eyes casting down and light dimmed down because he’s not built to fight battles of the people, folk tales of a hero in midst of the ocean of sea-blue dogs given out to travelers and any poor sapped sucked to listen like sweets to a child leave a taste of second hand smoke, faux in a way that’s not him, that’s never been him; but the smaller part of him, the one that’s always aimed hard and high at the people taller then  _kicked,_ doesn’t want that anymore. The apathy terrifies, and ignorance kills.

Thinks of Ishval and how they claimed in a war, unrightfully, because wars are between opposing sides that fight back and when no body fights back that’s just murder. He thinks of Rosé in all her callouses, soft despite that and how his own eyes ached looking at all that bare skin, and Liore’s desolate rich in it’s blind foolery so much it’s spitting up wine red deep and dark and closer than not to the color of blood, and the pretty, ornate church of Leto with devotees in a line stretched far and thin over hilltops.

He wonders if Rosé still hates him. His skin itches to go see, his throat pulses wildly at the thought.

 _When it’s over_ , Edward promises to the sleepy curve of the stomped-crack road as images of pleasant smiles and sword-callous palms and festival-lit nights firefly in his mind. It wobbles, weak.

He sighs long and just feels tired now.

Footsteps clack with noise jerking him back to present and first thought fight. He can’t shove down the flinch in time, and turns around quick to hide it, facing with his shoulders and scowl, fifty percent glare and the other half a lot of showing teeth. It seeps from him, filling those spindled cracks, as he blinks away that primary instinct at the sight. “Ling?”

“Wrong answer, kid,” he bites back, swimming from the shadow’s swallow with his full profile, as Edward’s eyes ache on the following line of Ling until it’s not, red darker in all accounts on par of Ishvalan surviving ministrations. Pale and pulled as thin as he can go in that body, a sheen with some strain that feels physical.

Edward returns, flat, “Greed.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” the homunculus grins toothily, but it flinches a bit weakly on the left side. “Looks like we gotta winner.”

“What are you doing here?” Edward growls out—poised towards escape.  

“A walk,” Greed says. “Those shitty excuses of tents can get awful cagey after awhile.”

“You literally have your own all to yourself,” Edward deadpans.  

“Did I stutter?” says Greed.

“God,” Edward says, and there’s something almost disbelieving in his voice, as if he’d forgotten how Greed could grate of his perfect patience dutily just so, “you’re such an asshole.”

“You don’t even believe in god,” he points out. “And aren’t you supposed to be respectful or some shit to your boss?” And oh, well, Edward can’t be blamed really, because if nothing else the Fullmetal Alchemist’s infamous streak of stubborn rebel to authority with fists on his hips and a cross between scowl and smirk that lower rankings cower in shadow of is known, something Mustang and Bradley both can attest to.

Edward goes on: “A bastard, prick, goady kidnapper, whiny bitch, absolute dick, big-footed _jerk_ —”

“Aw,” says Greed, tracking a mimic tear down the curve of his cheek with a blunt-edge nail. It’s gray, dusting the edges, always weapons drawn for the forever-living. “Well now you’re just hurting the prince’s feelings there, kid. Says he has perfectly acceptable size feet, and Amestraians just have a thing for the little and petite.”

“An asshole,” Edward reiterates sharply. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go spend my time— “ He doesn’t finished.

A sharp whistle speeds through air, shouted behind with precision, “Stop where you are! All citizens must be indoors by 2100 hours!” Edward whirls and squints out up at a thick handlebar mustache and cold-nipped nose dressed up in swathes of blues and donning military personnel status gold, braided garlins. Then he’s flickering through all rooftop veins and street arrangement—muscles convulsing with that presence sense of danger, invoking every old ritual and used-before solution plan—like a poorly put together presentation of  _Best Last Minute Escape Routes from the Cops for Dummies_.

In the rising dawn, he’s hyper aware of Greed, standing there stocky and solidly lax with ready prepared fists at his hips and the left indent of his wide-face smirk twitched, ghosting presence too warm and alive to be any kind of wraith, even drench in fishhooked slivers of moon. So familiar and different in a way of constant war, the flow of it fighting back incessant, and it jolts across his skin like lightning the relation of reassurance flooding in blood and bone with it. Maybe, if they can make it the fifty yards to that alcove, or if Edward can scamper up the depressions of a building two stories to his right quick enough for the MP to have either pulled his gun or called back-up, they can—

He doesn’t get that far.

Greed shakes himself and gathers his limbs into control. In a flash, Edward’s tossed bodily over his shoulder with elegant maneuvering, loading him up with the small weight spread asymmetric along the strain under rippling biceps. The absolute knee-jerkness of the reaction startles Edward’s temper back, like a lion hit with the head of the whip in a circus cage, blinking minutely mute before sharpening that graze of both eyes with intent to prey.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Edward squirms, his teeth clacking inside his jaw, the pads of his fingers searching but finding no hold in the inhuman layers of ironshield carbon. He shoots a glance back into the wind, seeing the spot of blue in the murk dance and flail, keep up poorly. They’ll call for backup, he thinks darkly. They always call for backup. “I would like to put in a complaint to the manager! Your communication sucks balls!”

“Gettin’ us...the hell outta...here,” Greed grunts, words slurring on against the other, so slightly. “Hold on tight...kid.”

“Stop!” Edward shouts, as the stupid, inexcusable panic sets in. He flails awkwardly. Kicking, hitting, biting with teeth baring anger. They race down a street way, Greed taking a sharp right first chance, half a second hesitation to judge the slope of the alleyway building wall.  “Stop it, Greed! Put me down already!”

The shield crawls lower running jagged claws, enclosing more of the softness of human flesh. Between his teeth, Greed hisses out, “Be quiet.”

“Not until you get your hands off me!” Edward struggles, a tighter, unfelt hold on Greed as he tests the first ledge, cleaving five digit pricks to the bricks, shifting the shared weight between them to bearable, and he forces himself a semblance of still.

“Shut your...trap, brat.”

“No, you—”

“Fucks sake! Will the both of you shut up!” Greed snaps, heaving with the exhaustion of it all. The air around them freezes, fullstop. Edward’s brain spirals, chunks of it on the pinched mouth, It feels like he just swallowed one million fishbones. With desperation, he thinks:  _Ling_. He thinks:  _he’s there_. He thinks,  _of course_ , and maybe understands a little better.

Greed’s never been human, that’s the gist of it, anyway. He’s hungry in a single aspect of any to all humanity, firstly burning gasoline-bright and ugly-hot. No sign of dousage in near sight past the coal-fire blues and second hand, artificial whites. Ling wears his skin a similar fit, trying to blanket those flames that thrum powerfully bruising, but he’s human from birth and life—Edward can still imagine those hands, all the leftovers of battles previous, long and hard-palmed. The ones slowly crafting sloppy clay moldings of an ever living doll-face’s foundations, nurturing flight into the hollow bones of wings that were always there.

They’re halfway up, now. For a moment Greed lapses in the progress, hesitantly changing the the distribution to manageable from bearable, saddling Edward piggyback-like taking the moment he gives in no resistance to full permission. Edward’s not sure, but he imagines he feels one of Greed’s muscle spasm. He keeps from letting his head spill into the crook of Greed’s neck, childishly.

“I could have run myself, idiot,” Edward says lowly, despite how suddenly boneless he feels then, and it doesn’t sound as mean this time, even to his own ears, twisting a showy snarl flush to the shell of Greed’s ear. “You’re getting tired.”

Greed jerks his head in too flowy movements back and forth. “This isn’t physical exhaustion. It’s just a hiccup, I ain’t some weak meatsack like you. If I put you down you’d have been coughing red all the while and I don’t wanna deal with the design faults in the human structure at the moment.”

A pregnant pause. And…well, that, Edward gets. Overwhelming always looks costly on anybody, sitting on Greed’s brow detrimental and inimical.  _If not physical, then what kind of exhaustion is it?_ Edward breaths, on the tip of his tongue. His gold eyes flicker, following Greed’s movements—Greed as he leaves clouds of fingerprint grim on crystal windowsills, Greed vaulting off the wall, then jogging on rooftops—like a curious magnet.

“They’re still looking,” Edward finally says, arresting in attention and straining both ears, it the strict sounds of loosely heard orders below is anything to go by.

“Okay, whatever,” Greed says, implied rolled eyes in his voice, with barbarous and thorny roses of their Dublith-during bitters that feels not belonging with the tone and current. He plops Edward down to the gravel roof-floor, as ungently careful as he could. “Here, you’re on the ground now. Happy? Now be quiet.”

So when Edward rubs his back over more so in habit that need, he makes a quieter noise of protest, still not fitting right in his mouth, looking up thickly through his lashes and bangs. “Last time I listened to you we ended up gambling me and all our cens for our lives.”

“They had guns on us then!” Greed sputters.

“They have guns now, too,” Edward shoots back.  

“Well last time,” says Greed, crossing his arms, as he points his nose away indignantly, “there was at least better company, my kind people really.”

Edward blinks three times, then says: “Greed what the ever loving fuck—”

“Shh!” Greed doesn’t hesitate before pouncing, bearing down on Edward with his palm, cutting him off at the mouth until all sibling instinct perseverance overrides and he licks at it wetly. “Did,” says Greed, stalled by high disbelieving, “did you just  _lick me_?”

“Did  _you_ just put your hands on me?” Edward hisses back, sniffing indignantly.

Greed rolls his eyes. “Oh please, don’t pretend you wouldn’t have minded it if it was Ling being the one talkin’ right now.”  

“Do you  _ever_ shut you?” asks Edward, with a pitch in near disbelief.  

“Not typically, no,” Greed says, eyes away from Edward, all on the cityscape, ravishing hungrily on the swimming colors all below four stories. “And this is my second time saving your ass. You definitely owe me now.”

 _I don’t owe you shit_ , he can’t force from his mouth, the inequivalence squirming somewhere uncomfortable under his skin in a force of flame. He snaps it close instead, watching.  

If the silence has any problem in conflict with Greed and his chasings, he says nothing. That at war expression is still pinned crossly from the crook of his nose to the way his polished red eyes blaze over. Edward kinda wants to smooth his fingers over the clench of his jaw, before he remembers who this is, irons himself to look into the red haze so much inhuman, and sternly steels himself.

“This will all be mine one day,” Greed says wistful. Dreamy and daring and dizzying. Like he’s overflowing with that single wish whispered to stars and any eavesdropped earfill, that hulking need overtaking in such an unfulfilling way. That fire, lacking in human and blood, daggering teeth open wide like a snake prepared to devour all stomach aching.  

“What do you want, Greed?” Edward asks him.

“I want to rule the world,” Greed says simply to infinite.

“You’d be a shit ruler,” says Edward.  

“No.” Greed lowly shakes his head, definitely. His raises his arm, tracing the lines Ling’s fingers and calluses Ling’s hand in human wonder, reaching, reaching, reaching, making a fist. Or maybe, thinks Edward, grasping at something untouchable. “I’d be the best. And it’ll all be mine. And finally—”

He cuts off.

Edward stares.

At that moment, he can recall with absolute high-definition how Greed’s eyes would go fuzzy and full, in the same way Alphonse would leave without really leaving from beside Edward sitting. The way he exclaims hands-on-hips verbatim Ling’s words at the most inopportune times and mutters up his lips five feet behind weightless arguments with air. The scatterbrain times whenever he’d cozy up to first spotted of the other three pasting on dimple breaking grins bright in twin rows of jagged-edge teeth, leaning back on his palms with offered little to no help, satisfied laying there pin-up-like, almost out of nowhere after storming off to the starlight as if on a pilgrimage.

He can see Ling’s flittered face, crystal clear. “There’s an empty,” he would say and Edward would ask all dumbly, “An empty?” then Ling would smile kindly weak, nodding once with a sharp cut, and he would tell him, “A hole gaping. Unfillable, it feels. Like it can be, but after a minute you’re back to the fact again you’ll always have this growing thing inside your chest until it consumes you and then some. So you have to keep chasing after those moments, as few as they may be. A different sort of swallow, that comes with sins and souls as the package deal, I suppose.” He’d sigh, rubbing almost absently at the place just above his rabbiting heart with the hubris hand. “I wish Father had explained all the fringe benefits and employee endangerments of applying to the job position a little more thoroughly.”

Edward lets his eyes trade over for the work for once, and let them roam, drinking on every detail of the valley sets of his shoulders to the pencil straight stride he carries with his back to those two-sharp eyes a half pupil black. Lets a breath in through the nose and out through the mouth, barely heard audibly. It’s there, Edward sees, unmissable. There and unmissable and a hugely yawning cavern jaw.  

“And finally?” Edward asks.

Greed blinks and there’s almost something surprise, soft in that different-same way that Alphonse has scooped his wounds in between twin giant gauntlets as if he were a puddle, how Ling rounds at all his hard edges gone blurry beautiful with crescent moon creases smiling under his eyes. Then it’s gone, in the second just as fast, but his eyes rake and devour every inch of Edward with a look so way off the track he’s treking it towards rocky shores.

“You’re smart enough to figure it out,” hums Greed. “And lovely too, an easy thing on the eyes.” He pauses, and gazes a little too intimately down the line of gold that Edward is and always has been. “When you’re not scowling at least.” He sighs breathily, smiles such cocksure, saying, “I can see why the prince as taken such an eye to you. Of course, that’s all the more reason to keep you.”

“I’m not an object, asshole,” Edward scowls determinately, pointedly ignoring the mention of Ling and all the ciphered meanings in between the lines that jump in his chest cavity, swelling and soft. So, so soft.

“No,” Greed agrees all too easily. “But you are mine, Edward Elric.”

 

**_________**

 

He doesn’t have time for a first though or a second before he’s keeling over in searing pain that brings him clumsily to his knees, strong with the heartbeat pulse of fear.

 _Big brother_ , he screamed; she groaned.

Edward prostrates himself to the earth, doubled over with every jolt that leaves him weak as a newborn, wispy thoughts and scents and sights still chasing him even here. Layers of the human body, minerals, materials, atoms, all at the cheap childish cost flit through his head.

He’s trying to slide past it, the ruckus and disarray that brushes in the corners of his mind still red and raw and it  _hurts_. For a moment, he sees Alphonse, can’t see his mouth move because he doesn’t have one in that metal body he carved his place into, whispering:  _I’m not real, brother_.

And that’s just fucking  _perfect_ , Edward marvels sarcastically, as the shadows follow him from deep unconsciousness. A part of him wants to chuckle, the other half sobs as the not-there little brother crashes on knees, chest open like in an autopsy (the ones he’s glimpsed during investigations hollowed with organs and bones, the ones he never let Alphonse in to follow).

“My arm,” Edward gasps.  _It hurts_ , he grits. Peeling apart, he feels, layer by layer by layer.  

The there-but-not-there Alphonse says,  _Why do you even care what happens to me_?

 _Because your my brother_ , he wants to say —to scream.  _You’re all I have left._

Alphonse doesn’t move, but marionette-like the plated forearm groans, creaks and points. He knows she’s there before he can even see her.

Nina watches him with big liquid eyes she must have gotten from her mother, seen only wide and happy captured in the report photo with her death penned on it with a shift to the left. Besides where he dirties his knees, she sits, skirt blossomed around her like new bloom. Petal soft and gentle, with her child awe in everything notably absent. The armor is limp in front of them both.

 _A toy puppet_ , Nina grins, cupping the decapitated helm of Alphonse with the delicacy that belongs to darling dolls and wheeled train sets. Edward’s eyes immediately train on the spot that binds them, the seal — blood calling to blood, scarred skin to scarred skin — habit and instinct working in tandem before he can process, with older brother care despairing in his eyes when he sees the slate wiped clean, just smooth silver shining.  _He’s not real, big brother_ ,  _see?_

“No,” he sobs, sealing eyes shut.  _Nononono._

 _See?_ she asks him, face becoming longer and hands shifting thicker. Shallow skin paling snowy, and hair dripping across her face in arches of long spider-like nimbleness as her nose wetly blackens like drying ink. Together again they peer at him though eyes pure pupils, taunting him.  _Look, broken boy, look._

Almost, he does. But fathoms of her have never been kind, but in the end neither has he so he glimpses, knowing and still can’t force himself to turn tail and run.  _S_ he’s there. Edward lowers his eyes under thick, damp lashes, eyes heavy in their corners and sockets, and wonders if he can weep.

 _‘M sorry_ , he begs.  _Please, I don’t wanna go back. Don’t make me go back_.

 _After all you’ve done,_ says his mother with that sweet voice in that horrid body, at odds with one another that rips at every seam of reality’s ties, guts him open of everything he has left,  _it’s what you deserve._

They’re child small and darkly void and palming his face, touching his shoulders, clawing his chest, and he can’t  _breathe_ as the take him. Struggles and pulls his lungs into large gaspy that make his head spin, dizzily scooting backward until he hits something solid and dark as more arms dart towards him. Open hands. Open palms.

Open smile.

“Al,” he moans, pained. “Al, Al, Al.”

They’re grabbing him. Trying to take what little bits of flesh and body are left, what pieces haven’t been casted as scrap metal in poor and poorer attempts to get the ruined to rise, glory days gone and a notice of wispy sights pouring red and smells burning iron, a future, a truth.

It’s choking him, lobbing his cries and screams to middle of strained vocal chords that feel cut. The air around him swells, cloying with heated vigor fiercely sun but so much colder and darker. The hands are ice until that ice turns to burning frostbite that sears what’s left of skin, hot at the point where snow could capsule that flame. Bile turns up his throat.

“Please,” Edward whispers and everything stops. (He hadn’t expected it to, because he’s never been one to want very much and when he did he never got it.)

Someone says, “Ed,” and he has to blink away nightmares and memories that are a white-hot nova behind shut eyes. “Ed,” the voice borders louder. “Look at me, Ed. Breathe.”

Ling, he thinks, and then predisposition takes over his tongue, saying, “I’m fine.” He coughs ugly into his chest.

Ling’s arm jerks bodily before snapping back with given whiplash. He looks hesitant, like he wants to move and help and touch, but Edward squirms and chokes out again. “Are you hurt?” he asks, teetering on daring something dangerous.

The pain scored in scars, Edward figures, along his viscera is just another to pile to the collection he carries unable to burn. The ache that wears itself along his back as a constant, how he has to roll his right shoulder in time with every few minutes and keep a palm flat and grabbing at his thigh.

“Fine,” Edward swallows. Sweat pins the cloth of his collar to his chest bone as he shies away from the heat of Ling’s gaze. “I’m fine,” and because it’s obvious neither of them can believe that with him hunched over double and mouthing at dirt, adds: “Just a little sore. My ports...they ache.”

“They ache,” Ling says.

“Uh. Yeah.” Edward blinks.

A sigh leaves and with it some of the tense rigid  in Ling’s shoulders. He looks over Edward again with a sudden prepared perseverance, fiercely kind. “Well take your shirt of then.”

Edward swallows down his blush until he feels it like a physical knot. “What?”

“Take off your shirt,” Ling says, still glazed as something far too happy, like he should be placed with a backdrop of spilling sunset and cheesy cascade of water dampening his hair poured down.

“I heard you the first time,” says Edward—half sure he’s actually steaming right now—and flounders. “But, uh, why?”

The eye roll is palpable making Edward feel silly and then hating himself for feeling silly as Ling folds his legs closer underfoot, easing the situation with cat’s grace, like Edward was some animal with ears up and chest furred out in weak attempt to seem more than he was despite the hisses and snarls masking feared whimpers and weeps. “Oh just because I want to see you shirtless,” Ling scoffs, then holds his eyes as his ears glow unbidden red. “No, Ed—well actually, yes, but preferably at another time—I meant take off your shirt so I can give you a massage.”

Edward blinks. “What?”

“Oh dear lord,” Ling says, and waits, arms open, unrelenting. “Just take off your shirt.” Then clears his throat violently, seemingly remembering himself. “Or—I mean, lift up the back? I could give you my jacket to cover yourself, if you wanted. Whatever you’re good with, of course.”

“Why the hell do you care,” Edward mutters out the side of his mouth with lack of heat, just sounding tired, caving immediately.

Ling limply shrugs. “Because.”

They bore holes into the other with fixed gazes then, Edward darts away first, shoulders drooping and slowly coming up to tug the white-button up, not bothering with the teetius aspect of picking it apart and letting it settle soft of the ground. Edward physically stops himself from looking up at Ling’s pleased as punch interest on his compliance to much, coming up with his arms to wrap self consciously high.

“Okay,” he says, licking his suddenly dry lips.

Ling huffs, beckoning him with a hand scooping hair, pretty in moonlight. The rolled eyes is just implied in the tone. “Come here, dummy.”

Against the offer of Ling’s warm waiting hands and careful grin, Edward’s barren and cold rest is still the far more frightening option, so he eats down his pride and thin lines his lips to war with the scarlet hued caps of his ears ignoring all blaring warnings a sixth instinct embedded to the grain of skin and bone.

He leans into Ling’s chest, spent. The latter holds him there in that ninety degree sprawl that slides languidly across the dirt with pace as slow as snail. At the first touch his position is poised and stanced battle wise, but eventually he spills back with a body a puddle of black, floppy exhaustion heaved into armor. His head tips back with distinguishable bliss that drinks in how every second saps weighted restlessness and dragged wariness from his muscles, pressed his head and rubbing it against his human pillow.

Immediately Ling stills carefully. Then he’s warming working again, rubbing at woes. A thought crosses, wondering if this is making Ling uncomfortable in some way, this lazily drawl of child weapon a great contrast here, but Edward can’t single on any idea before he’s pulled into the riptide current again. Drowning, deep and dark, but he can’t find he minds much anyway.

“What happened here?” Ling murmurs with barely any use of his mouth. The pad of his thumb runs circles made for perfect alchemy where scar tissues juts in stone hedges of different bases of toughness, some parts still soft and spongy and others with a rocky rigidness.

Edward grunts, trying to take back that second cementing a tenseness to his shoulder blades folded back like feathered wings. “Happened two months ago. Kimblee’s a jackass and I…I don’t know. I made a mistake, maybe. Made a lot of those pretty recently.”

He wonders briefly at the way Ling’s calloused hangs drag hot down his sides, how he seems to grip onto Edward intermittently taking to it like lathering of hot glue between the two. Thinks of the riverbed of guilt he’s dragged on his back in a bodybag since age five then eleven then fifteen. Ling’s taking fingers loosening his grasp the way Alphonse always did, relieving him in moments of pure bliss, two-sides of the same coin done in entirely different ways of affection.

A breadth of fresh air as weights are eased from his heaving chest he didn’t know were there. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to it. All becoming blurred something of confusion at a  look too far down that line.

“This couldn’t have been you’re fault,” Ling murmurs agilely, fanning spread hands over the bump and ridge some more.

Edward just hums, unconvinced.

Long arm ropes itself pressing muscles in stomach flesh, like scarred skin flush against like scarred skin. Two sides of the same coins, and Edward can’t help the shiver that rattles through vertebrae by vertebrae the hand sliding to the sister scar made opposite, standing pillars a complimenting synonym with different chinks cut out by wear and war. In that second, he knows not all but enough of what had happened under debris made ruins. Casualty of mercy. Atonement of a sinner.  

 _After all you done, it's just what you deserve_ , hisses something ugly.

A breath shakes in his mouth.

“It went through,” Ling says, fear rolling underneath of the flat of his tongue. “It went—something went through you, Ed.”

Edward thickly swallows, bowing his head like there’s something shame filled of the admission . “Was just some beam,” he murmurs, lowly, “Heinkel and Darius pulled it out for me, and I sealed it up quick enough. They got me to a doctor pretty soon after too so I’ll still be kicking ass.” He weakly shrugs, pained with smiling but the instinct for it is almost as knee-jerk as scowling, learned in route from childhood habit. When his mother had evaded abandonment with sharp denial and needed the little bits of joy like man hungers when starved, when Winry’s hands crafted for him a new arm asking if it hurt if he was alright, when Alphonse joy drags at the bottom in his metal boots because emotion is all he has left that Edward hasn’t taken from him yet and, he thinks, he needs to return the favor at least. “I’m alive still so it all turned out alright, in the end.”

“But you’re still hurting,” Ling presses, knowing. The feel of fingers becomes hesitant, wanting to heal and to help, but not wanting to inflict anymore pain to an already hurt enough wound.  

“Just a lil’,” Edward lies, but he can taste the luxtate and copper behind his back molars, and swallows. Keeps his breaths from getting gaspy. “I’m mostly good now so ‘s fine. Don’t really wanna think about it.” Please stop.

Ling tucks the bridge of his nose into meaty flesh of Edward’s shoulder, tugging his arms tighter. Edward takes to it like a lifeline. He tries to push himself closer, almost pushing himself in his lap.

“I promise I’m  _fine_. Nothing I haven’t put myself through before,” he says, weakly.

“ _Ed_ ,” Ling says. “This shouldn’t—it’s not—” a sharp inhale in. Out. “It shouldn’t be something you have to go through.”

“You shouldn’t have had to get possessed by a giant dickhead to save your people, but you did,” says Edward. “Alas, life’s a bitch and nothing’s fair in love and war.”

“Does that mean I—we should just be okay with it?” demands Ling turning the conversation back round again, with something foolishly ferocious, startling the answer from Edward’s lips again but it doesn’t matter because it’s already something he knows without shadow of a doubt, and Edward can’t find in his face if that makes it better, or not.

There’s a beat of emotions and expression that Edward can’t grasp right, that shakes him to is very core, undos him in every way he’s built himself up from, sends anxiety and adrenaline lancing to the top of his brain setting his spin with a snap straight. He’s not good with these sort of things, clumsy and messy when put to his hands. There’s no easy fix, no array for his mind to spit at him. A gray wash in the black and white of the world he sees.

He hums, lungs spiked with thorns that made him swallow back any words he had. Wherever Ling’s hand follows his story laid out bare on his back, mapped in the white, pink, and red ugly lines, it burns in a way he never expected to be pleasant. He’s safe enough here, in Ling’s arms, however fucking sappy that was, slightly turning, Ling sharpening in focus. He pulls Edward up a little closer, one hand treasuring his face, thumb running slow circles along the apple of his cheeks; and the other still pressed reverently against the back half of his wound, as if terrified that letting go would lose him forever.  

Finally, Edward says, “I’m okay now. I will be one day. I’m fine,” because he has to be. There’s no other way. He’s fine.

He’s was fine at five standing in front of the jutting headstone like a judge, contentment for the earth beneath his twice worn dress shoes obvious, mother nature who’s always had a guiding hand for his mother’s bud for living things pretty, stretched her arms and took before wind and rain could chip at her any longer. Age ten and in the hands of mother nature’s mercy again—knowing the whole time she has none—taken from her into a den even more dangerous were only strong survived the knives and hits. Fine at eleven when all he could feel was hands that wouldn’t stop touching, to _uching_ ,  _touching, touching, everything_ taken; at twelve when he forced sculpture metal to his will, adding to the weight whenever he stood, his shoulders always slumped heavy.

Fine when he bowed to the floor and tasted dirt; fine when he obeyed and sat and stayed and fought like a good dog; fine the first time someone tried to kill him and the second and the other times he’s lost count to; fine when Nina’s full moon smile turned crescent, lips drawn wolfish, barred by fear and the very real chains they put on a four-year-old.

Never forget. Couldn’t forget, won’t forget, refuses to give into the relief undeserved until Alphonse could cry for the both of them.

But then, unwanted and unbidden, Ling’s face is glowing, back to that moment in the small bordering, nameless town, rosy cheeks flashing happily and black eyes ablaze with a sparkle. Happy handsome, staring at Edward there like that. And isn’t that just  _great_ , Edward’s inner-angst abandoned, for just one moment, that he’s become the biggest fool of Amestris, wanted to reach up and trace his hands down Ling’s face, there and his, words spoken through touch.

The sigh that slips pasts shutters in cold, and Edward’s head tilts up jutting the well cut chisel of his chin. Half of his mouth lifts into a smile that stays real, one crater deep dimple lopsided, finding it infinitely easier with the proffered warmth felt in a way he’s so unfamiliar with.

Ling smooths down the rest of his furrowed brow, softly. “Yeah.” He almost agrees. “One day.”

 

**_________**

 

Something shifts, in the dynamic in the open space like the gaps between fingers intertwined between them.

It’s that same shift that rolls through Edward the same way he brings his palms together then down and feels the world change, the tectonic plates move and mother nature’s berth giving in. How he sees past eyes glance into the miniscule fascination of the world. How it jolts like electricity under his skin, feels like power in his bone, and as embedded as blood. Second nature, forged instinct. So he feels the shift that moves like waves under his feet.

Imagines it like padding through bucket puddles in rainfall song with that same, familiar old ache. Imagines it as if it’s the rap against Alphonse’s metal, the second hand lights of military funded library shining washing him over from shoulders to toes, or the soothing, systematic check-up between injuries that stamp their issues like a scar into steel tissue worked by wrench on bolt. It’s brimstone fire and three plated knives and that defaced dragon-headed pocket-watch. It’s like a homecoming.

He finds Ling after drifting tentative around a few meter scope of the campsite.

Saying he was looking for him—well, that’s generous, as it’s more like he was dropped and punted, pushed and shoved at by all the pinning, knowing stares that Darius and Heinkel had no right to. The assholes.

But for Edward and his wanderlust soul, home as never been a place so much as heart. He burned down the ties of his first and bonded with the seal of his second in his little brother, comes around because Winry left a piece of it through craftsmanship of his arm and leg, circled on route to attachments he feared and hated as much as craved hungrily for through his four travel years.

“Hey,” says Ling, before he can even see him, placated chest-up, forearms wedged under his head in place of a pillow.

“Uh,” Edward swallows, shifting on his toes, “hey.” He shuffles that much closer, slowly levering himself down, clumsy limbs in a tight coiled ball of tense anxiety repressed.

They’re not the same height, laid out like this, not even when standing toe-to-toe Ling’s nose-to-rainy curls and Edward’s crisscross expression-to-a broad chest that yellow jacket flaps tease along never failing to make him furiously flush, especially now, when Edward’s grown only an inch (two at best) more and despite all can’t swallow up enough of himself to frown and complain beyond drifting, tired eyes.

It’s not that Ling doesn’t notice, for his part, built for it brick up with purposeful sharp eyes searching, owlish small. Staring and noting through the apertures of possession as neither work to make any direct contact with the fact issued at hand between them. While Ling’s a mastery in observation, Edward walks tightrope on the tin wire of hawkseye and obliviousness. He can pick up on the certain differing footfalls on people each, but can’t locate the emotions put out like a valley on mountain faces without a compass, map, and GPS for guide.

 _You’re just hopeless like that_ , Alphonse simply told him once, lovingly, truth laid of plainly leaving him squirming in the wake of the bluntness both shared and disliked immensely. Edward had snarked back,  _You’re just rude like that,_ and been stoned violently by gauntlet wielded pillows made of rock.

“Greed’s saying we need to talk,” Ling says, once Edward’s settled greenly, “and that I need to stop waxing poetics about how even after all this time your hair still catches the light as if sun-kissed by a god.”

Edward chokes on his spit. “You can’t be serious.”

“You’re right.” Ling nods sagely with the face of a man that’s about to placate a hand on a dragon’s muzzle. Twisted, he tilts up, just barely, and bares his neck like a promise. His gaze on Edward and never leaving. “It’s actually about how your eyes are as enrapturing as the royal jewel’s in my father’s palace. How they’re shining the same as the stars in Xing, not Amestris because Amestris has no bearing with your beauty. How, even after all this time, I can’t help by gaze in them and wonder a little more about you every time, because your so amazing stupid, Edward Elric, and I can’t help but want to understand you in a way I’ve never deemed necessary for anyone else.”

“ _Ling_ ,” says Edward, with wide blown eyes that forcibly fall lower down, stumbling on his breath. With emotion and feeling and honesty that lodges itself into incoherent messes and facts and figures that make his head spin dizzy trying to chase after. Makes him flush a humiliated red. Ling still staring, unabashedly.

Inch by inch, slowly Edward feels warm palms and calluses pads of roughed hands crawl up in circles around his knuckles, grasping till they’re meeting touch to touch, skin to skin. This time more hesitant and gentle, and in that moment Edward freezes and stutters. Ling says, “He’s also been telling me how I need to take want I want before it has the chance to slip past my fingers.”

“I don’t…” says Edward, dumbly.

“When I first met you, Ed,” Ling says, “I thought you were an easy mark to pay for my food and make into telling me how to get off with the Philosopher's Stone.”

“You ass,” he croaks, swatting feather-light with his automail, in a breathy tone that feels much too honest and makes Ling smile all crescent moon and silver tongued mischief. Ivory fangs poke from over his lips offly, and his eyes crinkle with color of the dark side of planets. He inclines his head up, and drips down softly brushed mouth against the span just above Edward’s brows.

“I never made a friend on my own before,” Ling murmurs to the skin under his hair that burns bright, as if it’s a secret. “But you’re stubborn and so awfully bullheaded, but also soft and bright where you hide your small laughs behind your hands and only can smile real in three distinct ways and how you try and do care so much about everything. I think, I would always choose a thousand times over to stick by your side.”

Edward thinks with fever:  _hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, carbon, aluminum_. It’s too much, all too much, the weight of those world's written in the meaning. The implication heavy as world’s and Edward doesn’t know what to do with it. He fumbles and folds easy as origami under it, rights himself again steady because for Ling he’ll try and then some.

The moment when, they had tumbled out skyward, crashing planar and earthside again on debris concrete in bodies rolled balls of trained discomfort, spilling his mass halfheartedly along profiled souls looking at them in shades of green. When, all bathed in the red and gray-purple hue, Ling held his proffered hand steady, Edward shakily coming up to meet it halfway in the moment before his mind could catch chase on his body and instinct. The moment where his thoughts didn’t outrun him, turned over to Ling, thinking:  _we’re home_.

“I—didn’t want to leave you,” Edward says over the choke all lump stuck in his throat, and knows he doesn’t need to clarify between Ling has dimpled grins and rosy apple cheeks and feels over every bump and dent on Edward’s fingers with a virgerous hold. “You’re an annoying asshole and cheat, but. Not again. I couldn’t leave you again. You’re my friend, too, idiot.”

“You’re so very contradicting like that, Ed,” Ling teases lightly, wearing a pout involving a lot of lower lip and large eyes. “Claiming me a friend then turning around and calling me a fool. How cruel.”

“Yeah? Well—it’ not like you’re any better,” Edward accuses, biting back fierce and hot. His stomach rolls, and his neck flushes all over. “I still don’t get what you mean by all of this.”

“Oh?” Ling arches a perfectly plucked brow high. “I thought I made myself painfully obvious here.” And then he’s diving in, not even thinking twice about tugging his arms around Edward, rolled over proper, twisted at neck and hips in a hold with purpose, up turning the two of them so it’s Ling’s silhouette tacted to the sky breathes working visibly, and Edward doesn’t thrash under the grip, he realizes with some level of calm he’s immensely proud for, instead going predatory still under it.  _Silicon, phosphorus, chromium_ , Edward thinks in humiliated shades of red and braves on strong.

On hands and knees Ling cages Edward at his hips, at his shoulders, a docked curtain of black brushes along the sides of his cheeks. “Get it now?”

“Yeah, I think so now,” Edward says breathily, eyes wide as moons. Some things never changed; including Edward’s proclivity for reckless abandon at the drop of a hat, mind working in certain functions of  _Foreplanning_ and  _The Moment Now_ each set off in a toss up to the stars. “But, ah, um. Might need some data, for science and all. I am an alchemist after all, y’know. Always need proof.”

“Proof?” Ling asks with barely any use of his lips.

“Mhm.”

“Nerd,” Ling snickers jerkishly. He says, “Here,” then acts. Fingers delve into the creases of his upper arms, and for flash of a moment Edward can map each of Ling’s eye-lashes, half lidded gaze hazed and glossed darkly over with something hungry and knee deep in want.

Set in his own set of limbs left Edward finds in himself a same desire so similar that turns his legs jelly and sends stunned shivers down his own spin, shellshocked by his own devotion to the belly burning feel that never ceases in the selfish few taken seconds of time’s ever turning clock hand. He’s in too far. In too dangerous. Since the age of three his mind has been to alchemy, at twelve his body forged ready as a weapon. He’s never had this before, an outsider that hasn’t built him up from the start find their way, pushed apart wall by wall with nimble fingers through everything put up in a desperate and childish attempt to salvage the parts of himself still raw and untouched.

But Ling moves with strides, rivers for feet and agility set born in his paws. The impossible sought out, because he’s always been one to dare the devil in chase of life everlasting in taste of a bleeding ruby. He brings the hands able to wield swords and carry the lives of a clan among the hundred, calloused pads of his fingers dragging hot along his sides, lips even more so gentle on his. Edward’s breathing goes shallow.

A dam bursts inside him, and he’s always been impulsive and reckless in every aspect unable to tell danger or not from at least ten feet away, bearing the worst of his scars savagely, a red wound in a sea of blue, and even now it’s his battle weary mind at work.

He attacks Ling’s lips all teeth and tongue, kissing him hard and open-mouthed.

And Ling—for all he’s worth in gold and royalty—falls into it, a rip current where all you can do in lay yourself on the topmost layer of ocean and salt waiting for it to tire with you and finally spit you a place wild in freedom from tethering courses. Wait to see if it’ll never be bored, keep you and drown you fully to it’s whims. Acceptance, in the adrenaline closest to death as you stare down your grim reaper in both hooded eyes.

It tastes like sweetness and salt and white stars burst behind Edward’s eyes, and he gives in and shuts them, other senses taking wheel and white-knuckingly with brute force through love. Tastes sugar and sweat. Peach apples kept in canned for years, the non-fading flavor of touching mint leaves grown unruly and green.

Youthful experience in lacking, Edward’s kissed one (1) other person exactly—a silly circus boy on mission, brightly lavender, sweetly whispering, “You’re cute, Ed” before dipping down lips first barely toeing the line of the waters—and that had been enough to send him running red and ruined.

Can see the memory of childhood home weak and shaky around it’s wooden veranda burning unfinished that Hohenheim had fixed once before because when he’s not shelved into corners of his study as a permanent artifact he’s so fond of hoarding with fierce dragon symbolism, he’s the town-round repair man and a recluse local librarian and a lover that makes his mom smile so widely in ways about her he’s never been able to replicate, anything to take up the time of his clockwork role as father.  

Winry is next to him, just as stubbornly planted in packed sand and grass-bud dirt, flowering up in twin buttercup yellow. She doesn’t go as far as to copy the set scowl etched almost permanent in his face, with her own baby blues big as two moons, lighting the stars stave her face of any approaching dawn. “I think I’m in love, Ed.”

“You’ve been in love ten times already,” Edward groaned to the flesh of both his elbows. “What about Katie Larkson and her  _oh so pretty eyes_ with  _red hair so gorgeous not even the most costly ruby could compare_?”

Winry kicks sharply at his ankles. “I’m serious this time. Katie and the others don’t count. This one boy, the townie that came not too long ago, ran into me at the store corner when he and his folks were tryin’ to find directions to the inn. It was love at first sight.”

She’s always been tripping over her feet with eyes daring further and then some for an impossible horizon that will never met her windless stride, set sails ahead with a whole ocean to cross.

Maybe, if given time and another life that doesn’t exist in the space between splayed fingers and knuckles bloody, he could have loved her in the freely given way that an open heart brokenly sewed to a shoulder she had about her, honed in years of patch working curled hands around wraps of bandages kept in the dinner dish cupboard above the oven. Maybe if he was a more tangible thing and less fleeting, less trying to find the exit of every room and seeing the iron bars past every peasantry she could have settled her evermore free-for-all affection on him for more than a moment too soon.

Maybe if there wasn’t that broken glass, cracked and blurry on his pointy edges all fuzzy white. The one that didn’t want the same way other people did.  

Warm faced and crossed, Edward huffed, “There’s ain’t no such thing as love at first sight,” and Winry bolted forward with lightning sparking, protesting loudly, “Of course there is! I’m older so I obviously know more about these things,” and Edward replied smartly, “Where’s the data then? The proof?”

Fluidly next to him, Winry rocked back to her heel and thigh spread out starfished with scarecrow locks fanning her cheekbones and few flyaways pinned by sweat to her forehead, frown surfacing to the usual degree of annoyance. “Love isn’t some weird alchemically thing, dork,” she said, before turning proper curious in all childlikeness on him, adding: “Have you never had a crush on anyone before? Felt a flutter in your belly? Made your hands all camly, and eyes unable to look anyway but? Filled your head with all these thoughts ‘bout kissing and hand holding?”

“Ew,” Edward opted for, disengaged bluntly awkward, because no would be taken a little too sad by Winry for a roundabout reason dubbed by others who decided so. “Whatever. So is this the kind of stuff you go dreamin’ about while Granny has you studying...what was it? Atlas de Anthony….something, something?”  

“ _Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen_ , actually,” Winry corrected, and then delved as if vlynel play by play into the facts and structure and information then therefore inhaled through chaptered words to describe something as complex as the human body. Usually he’d listen with a disinterested scowl that turned the same sentences over his lips in small under breath murmurs, but he can’t because he’s still scowling and call only recall the roll of love over his tongue.

He’s never liked that affection, how it strays to the unturned paths away from mothers and brothers and sisters to touches meant that burn and palms pressed to ignite. Doesn’t get how other farm boys talk about the stitches on girls they’ve know all there life and tearing some, how they seem to always want more than just the beaming beauty that human and mortality offers, the simple adorations alchemy finds impossible to hand with artsmanship near an equal craft. Feared and ran and squirmed at the dew-dropped comments slipped from the casual drunkards.

Not wanting to confess touching anyone he doesn't come close to loving makes his skin crawl.  

Alphonse is a year younger than him, and that’s not much, really, but it makes Edward feel less alone in it because he’s a poor mixture, potent substance of age and reserve still stuck in the river of denial that swept them to alchemy’s weeping arms. Edward might not have understood all the other children (never had been, the inside joke laughed out from locked shut-ins of a sea of children) but he knew he loved his mother.

His mother who tucked his knees up in arms ardingly with two wrapping limbs long as a mother bird’s wing span, gentle as a butterfly’s first flutter, telling him,  _No matter how big you get you’ll always be my little man_ , and then whispering love tales and bravery quested. How she would poke Alphonse’s nose, grinning and sputtering with them, then say,  _One day you’ll find someone that makes you really happy, happier than you’ve ever been in your entire life and they’ll feel the same for you. You have to treat this person nice and polite when you find them, and make sure you think they’ll be your last love when you give them your heart because you only have one. And it might be so overwhelming you’ll feel yourself drowning, but you’ll learn. Learn how to breath in that burn._

He never could admit to tell her he didn’t want to know how.

But this he braves. Gives to the want, takes then some. Tastes the bumps and ridges of love and all it’s vowels over every feeling of Ling’s lips on his. Raises his left grip a little, positioned just so, then digs in deep to the gritty hair stiff and spotty so he can’t duck away. Inhales Ling’s exhale.

It’s everything—the all, the one—in a single moment. The kind of atmospheric pressure an adrenaline drugged high gives and takes that leaves him floating in a sleepy river of timeless stars; Shí Zi Jià, the Crane, Draco, the Snake’s Head, Delphini, Astrea—all there in the waves kissing his rough edges while he swims drowning. He blinks the bulbs of lights and spotty vision away, back to deep night and a slitted look with pupils large as oil slicks.

Ling still hasn’t let go, holding Edward’s sleepy faced glossy with something intangible, planting his elbows in the dirt and holding a gaze firm, heated as if Edward’s the most awe inspiring thing he’s ever looked at. As if he’s stepped back into the holy lands he swore never to cross foot and diminish upon again, and taken mantle as sunbringer. Hums with lifting thought in the way he glows hungry. Rapturous. Ardent and adoring.

(Loving.)

Edward twists his arms to capture a bronze hand, red faced and rosy eared, saying, “I think that’s all the data I need. For a while, yeah? We should try cuddling next.”

“Of course,” Ling concedes easily, nods brief, “for data, definitely,” as his forehead falls back on Edward’s with a soft breath. He’s smiling too.

 

**_________**

 

There’s the moments, where the moon softly settles and Ling bares arrowlike grins in his own skin, his motions smooth in color, eyes holding universes and universes holding stars on the restless nights it’s his shadowed gaze and not the burning, fine red—Edward can’t help but stare.

Strangely enough, he finds Ling to preen under the sunburnt heat of his attention, gone smug with the fact that he’s able to hold sun-wide eyes and not get immortal hands scorched. Possibly the only one who ever will. Because even before, under his queries and off-put gaze, people have always felt some need to turn head and distract that attention some other way.

They lie in flaky grass beds of dead-to-dying brown-yellowing lips, swarmed with bugs after all of Edward’s complaining hadn’t quite gotten through that he didn’t want to become a red dotted ladybug made up from mosquito bites to Ling, finding it easier to just roll his eyes and huff highly in the most obnoxiously indigent way possible, side by side.  

“The stars are out,” Ling says, fitting together the two unmarked hands because he loves the simplistic affection and after years without anything meaningful Edward’s little more than starved.

“Not really,” he replies lazily reaching up his free fist, a lone gunmetal gray finger a star against the black fog. “Still pretty cloudy. If you look over there those few look like a dick.”

“Mhm,” Ling agrees concedingly. “Yeah, though it also could be someone flipping us off.”

“The universe being a bitch,” Edward says, soft. “Sounds about right.”

“At least it’s a pretty bitch with a decent view,” Ling says. He reaches out and cups a warm palm, scooping up Edward’s cheek and blush. Edward tenses poised until the burn fades from a sharp ripple to warm sunspots dancing on his skin, spilling on a breathy sigh that leans closer rhythmically. He looks back.

Ling’s gazing at Edward with finespun adoration, stars so pinpointed like the ones that dotted those charts that were his mother’s favorite napped in his eyes. It’s something cupped with the soft that comes in sugar palmfuls on offered hands that sometimes eat like salt, but you keep taking because you’ve got nothing else and there’s an edged need. Ling’s face a delighted splash of red, with his forehead smoothed of stress, looking all god-like as if loving Edward isn’t some herculean effort. Does it with easy shouldered burden and a winning grin that drinks up kinder.

“There you are Ed,” he says. “You’re repressed emo boy persona is showing.”

“Huh?” Edward blinks, but doesn’t pull up the strength to pull away. Settles for a dumb stupor. “The hell you mean ‘repressed emo’?”

“You don’t—” Ling’s expression splits, cracking open an absolutely  _evil_ grin— “oh my god, you’re more helpless than me on these things. Good to know, that’s a nice dopamine spike to my confidence, thanks.”

“As if you’re ego needs that,” Edward says, bubbling in hate for how endeared he is before he could stop. Tacks on, “Asshole,” just to be safe.

“My ego is an adorable Drachman cat who puts wants to be stroked,” Ling says, fluttering his eyelashes pretty. He takes away his hand and Edward’s skin mourns the loss with a silent pire.  

“If I resisted letting Al keep every cat he’s stored in his armor ever, I think I can handle your weight cat ego. You get the pets when you’ve earned the pets,” Edward says, “Just equivalence exchange.”

“Equivalent exchange?” Ling asks.  

“Equivalent exchange,” murmurs Edward, more forcefully, tone taking up any little room for argument. Ling’s just happens to be excellent at shoving to make space, guilty grins all red handed.

He says, “Y’know, if the world bows in law to this equivalent exchange then, I’ve thought, Princess Chang, too, should be gifted the seat of emperor for all her own hardships. Lan Fan should be given back her arm, Darius and Heinkel shouldn’t be forced on the run with us, after all the trouble they’ve gone through. You and your brother should be returned to your rightfully earned bodies.”

Edward’s body stutters still. Ah, it was there, current in air shifts and changing winds, where the conversation was going. Feels himself being cleaved in half, machine and man, soldier and boy, with that single leadway statement. White burns fever-hued at the corners.

It’s never been simple, to understand that Alchemy might be all and one but all and one are very large, much larger than the circles and arrays he’s devoured with a full mind, never really ever wrapped it around the thought that people aren’t laws and equations. (The human body can be bought with a child’s allowance but it the best and only container that can jar souls, and they’ve always been one for defying rules of the sort.) Alchemy had been his skeleton key into words and worlds that felt faraway to a bumbling six-year-old Edward who hated change and light-wear linen shirt-sleeves and people who didn’t get it no matter how nice they were that Resembol had in its own small town hold.

“Do you know what sensory deprivation is considered?” Edward settles on finally, voice quiet.

Ling’s hands shake, he swallows down thickly on any block of a cracked answer, whispering back, “No.”

“It’s a form of torture. I subjected  _my baby brother_ to f  _ive fucking years_ of torture because I’m a selfish fuck that couldn’t even—“ he cuts off as sharp as a rose. Dulled from radiant hues and furry fires set deep in gaze, says for certain: “He doesn’t deserve this. He should hate me.”

Ling doesn’t reply immediately, though offers out open arms and leaves a decision in the center of them, and like Edward had said, he’s always been a selfish fuck. Let’s himself lean against skin the color of cooling bronze, breathing in traces of dust and dirt and grim with relief, and for the moment Edward allows himself the giving in of a small squeeze before pulling away, mind and body and soul all screaming as he pulls away too soon, rebelling the action leaving him cold all over.

But Ling’s not him and doesn’t let him go away completely with just a hair’s width to spare. “Forcing yourself to hold it all in like this,” he whispers, the pad of his thumb just brushing the skin purple and hanging underneath his eyes, shiny and wide, “is also a form of torture, too.”

“Like you can talk. Shouldering all that pressure to save your people and rise as emperor can’t be good for your back either,” Edward murmurs back.

Ling’s smile wobbles wonkily at the ends. “Yeah. We both got things we need to work on, in the end.”

“What are you talking about?” Edward says, tiredly offering most his weight on Ling’s shoulder. “This is just my repressed emo boy persona. Have to keep up appearances and all that.”

Ling nods seriously. “Of course I understand. Got to uphold the serious trauma from you actually horrible life.”

“Mhm, not actually horrible I’m fine. I just...accidentally spilled my guilt in guts or whatever, so now it’s your turn to say what’s on your mind,” Edward says, like they’re cut from the same reversible cloth, as if pines of Ling’s skin brushed against him isn’t like glass-kept wildfire someone tried to foolishly tame, eaten up by lips of yellow and orange in attempt to store it away with doe-eyed wonder. You can domesticate a flame, but there’s always wild blood inside that has no place for walls people name home.

“Xing is beautiful,” Ling tells him, with feeling. “The beach, the desert, the hills, the forests. The cities, the people. We have a giant festival, parties and celebrations and rows upon rows of food set out on our New Year’s Day. There’s masks, and parades, and when Lan Fan and I were little we’d sneak on some of the floats to steal the candies they would throw to the crowds then go eat all of it up on the rooftops while watching the fireworks. I’d love to take you to it one day.”  

“Sounds amazing,” Edward whispers honestly.  

“It really is, it’s just—I miss home so much,” Ling admits, hoarsely. “But I don’t—I can’t make myself want to go back sometimes. Because there’s people there that’ve raised me to be this leader and I’m scared to look them in the eye and let them down. And there’s so many lives depending on me so it doesn't matter if they believe in me or not because I still have to do something to save everyone of them. But....being out here. Makes me not want to, somehow. Does that make me awful?”

Thickly Edward swallows, wide eyed in every limb as he tugs Ling down to him, closer, guides him there as if this pathetic excuse for a hug is enough of a shield to actually comfort and care. Nurture with hands unused to do so.

“I’m so homesick, Ed,” Ling goes on, orbs of light catching salt water tracking down the apples of his cheeks, because human or homunculus, blood or no blood—crying has always been a universal curse and privy gift that marks planes on everything with a soul and many.

He’s seen plenty of his mother’s biting grins, pink at the edges of each cheek scrubbed knuckle clean, Winry bright and doe-eyed running on rivers of emotions milled over, Alphonse built silver and cold and iron-fisted hold on any blanket bagging his helm, the ones too transparent ghoulish with glowing orbs that burned from the midnight oil dry running. All that practice and still—as if written in his code, some part of his genetics he can’t wash off—it doesn’t make it easier.

“I’ve never had a place, really, to miss like you do your country...but, I get it. I think. I have a home in Al, and it’s not the same but...similar. Just because you don’t wanna have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders in your own damn home, doesn’t mean you’re awful either,” Edward struggles, wishing words were reactions and emotions were equations because while he could list the entire periodic table from atomic number to element to mass the Fullmetal Alchemist couldn't even string together words honeyed with expression to care for a friend. Maybe something more.

Ling wears his belonging like a serpentine yellow coat and a serpentine yellow coat like imperial proclamation. He deserves so much, and Edward realizes with scarce horror: he might not have enough left to give. Despite that weighing doubt, he staves it off fiercely, leans against Ling up to his shoulder so his forehead rests pillows against it, let’s his hands loosen and rope around his waist, one climbing his back high to rub a hand to smooth the frowns held terse into his shoulder blades.

“You’re a dick,” Edward says to him, lips moving softly against Ling’s throat. “But you’re doing your best, so just let that be enough for now. Wanting to be someplace else, doesn’t make you such a horrible person. ‘Kay?”

“I’m going to take you there,” Ling says determined with a foolish ferocity that comes with crowning ambition and a stubbornness to match that flicker of flame. His hand coming up to brush Edward’s hair, and Edward can see him then, fangs elongated and daring to world as long as it stretches. “To Xing, my home. When this is over. When we’ve won.” The empty echo, a record player on broke.

There’s a hollowed out chance, settled in the marrow of his bones all carved out, written in the blood spilt and spit with defiance, there in the empty place where limbs conceive of metal. His hands were crafted for something this soft, fingers with nicks and missing flesh clumsily fumble with it as droplets cascade in the narrow gaps between joints. At twelve and foolish he would have thrown it away, at fifteen hidden it to a place cold and less hurting, but now he’s still fifteen (maybe sixteen even, he finds half-delirious, last he’d checked it was January, but, maybe) and still foolish but a little braver maybe, and a lot more hoping.

Edward stares and stares at Ling for a moment gone ageless, too enamored to turn away abashedly. He trails a look down worked arms warmed pink where it’s cold, then further to where the mark that has painted a residence in his soul lays, says, “Well what are you going to do until then?”

Ling blinks up, turning to Edward’s gaze in line and sight and he has to twist away, the shy one while Ling can preen and glow, looking down at the tangle of hands—tan lacing brown—because no matter how much he tries he still can’t force through that uncomfortableness, touching tender. So he holds on tighter. Eyelashes flutter up, a little, watching another then another drop travel and vanish under the jutting line of his chin.

Then, with a sigh that empties the heaviness lifting his shoulders and sagging his eyes, Ling spills forward into the golden pillar there and set ready, sagging. Full stop.

“We won’t be fifteen forever, Ed,” Ling murmurs to the top of his hair.

“I know.” Edward buries himself farther into Ling’s chest, farther into the cloying plumes that come from the softness of a moment of two kids trying to save the world, the taken time to carve out this place in space, the still of forest wreaths covering the lines in between of a love story not known by name. “Still. This is nice for now, l know it’s your shtick and all, but let me be a little greedy. Just for a little bit. I want this to be nice for as long as I can get.”

He knows it’s there now without it being bored into him, the look Ling gets that he still doesn’t get in it’s broadness but ultimately yearns to understand with hungry fever, the perception and guileless gaze that spans to a radius large as space and all it’s stars, when Ling says, “Okay. I want that too.”

 

**_________**

 

“I just had an idea,” says Ling, one night, wearing stubborn on his face. “Imagine, like, edible clothes. That way you can clothe and feed yourself all in one and take food on the go easily. A perfect tool for survival.”

Edward blinks with eyes to the moon. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

 

**_________**

 

It’s dark and chirping in all areas that come from everywhere and in the nowhere outside the fire lit camp. Ling rolls with his feet locked, staring blearily from his arms to Edward’s form. “What if pigeons had feelings, Ed?” 

“I’m begging you to shut up,” Edward says, “and let me sleep.”

 

**_________**

 

Greed asks, suddenly, “Where’s Goldilocks?”

“You mean the little runt?” Darius says.

Somewhere off, to the east of a treeline, shouts make it back to camp of, “Who are you calling a runt so tiny that even a fucking beetle can crush on him with a single leg!”

“Found him,” says Darius as birds flock the sky in a rain of black.

 

**_________**

 

“Be mine?” Ling asks, wrapping long arms around waist and hips, a steel undercurrent in how feather-light in masks

“Greedy,” murmurs Edward as he pushes a kiss to his jaw.

 

**_________**

 

“Hey, Ling, you should teach me Xingese sometimes,” Edward says.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, like I mean since you saying you plan on taking me to Xing one day.” He half shrugs. “I know how to read a lil’ since, alchemy studies and all, but can’t speak it for shit.”

“Alright.” Ling nods, elbows propping up as stands. “Xiăo dān.”

“What does that mean?” Edward asks.

“It’s a term of endearment. It literally translate to ‘small egg’,”

“Honestly, fuck you, Ling.”

 

**_________**

 

He’s coming in and out, drifting all sprawled out when Ling slinks in and dawn breaks.

It’s closer now, to Promised Day, each crossed off date passing with darker stares from Greed into empty space, a different species of worry written plain across all expressions in langues Edward’s never had a tongue for. So really, it’s a toss up of chancing any and all luxuries before the end of the world and getting caught by packed up groups of hunters coming back to their cabins, immediately calling the MPs on them or trying themselves with rifled shotguns slung across their heavy lines arms.

Blearily Edward blinks back the ink that’s slowly slanted into a scrawl from its place behind his eyelids, pops systematically each joint heavyset stiff, still swallowing his exhaustion like molasses. “Huh?” he says all slurred and makes out the desk under his head. “Wha’ time?”

“Too early or too late. Whatever you prefer,” Ling answers, his hair sleep-tousled and sticking up adorably in the back. “Either way, definitely time for you to put down that book. It’s cold, and Darius and Heinkel stole all the good blankets.”

Edward doesn’t blurt how Ling has the eternal heating system equivalent to that of muscle furnace heaters, bites his tongue on that he runs warm all the way through, as if made up of the stuff and then some more. Instead, he takes it all in with a hungry sigh that slips out mostly breath. Giving his profile still stock-sure stubborn engraved all over, but arching closer into the toasty air Ling created just by being. Because he’s weak and carrying purple weights under each sleepy-lidded eye, so he scowls and determinately burrows low under the next passage that swims uselessly in his muddled mind. He says, “Go take it from them then. You’re the greedy one.”   

“You’re right,” Ling agrees all too easy, drawing it out. “I am. So what  _I_   _want_  if you to come to bed and cuddle while I’m here.”

“Ling,” Edward whines with differing levels of burning humiliation glowing up red.

Ling says, fingers working the grooves up along Edward’s shoulders, so seriously that he almost snorts, “I’m a very greedy boy, Ed.”

That warmth that crawls at the tips of the pads of his fingers, like lightning and all things bright, saps knot balls of stress generously soothing. Edward’s soul sings under the swallow of balm-like acknowledgement, working darkly down Ling’s gaze. At times, stilled icy under all the layers of overwhelming it brings, as Ling cranks up his most sunny of smiles and teapots open running streams of affection on the downpour, on Edward who runs his own between the quick cracks in quiet moments, out of sight and line, he’s reminded of cold comfort and soulfire irises.

Alphonse, with a spirit sweet enough to burn through all his frigid metalwork, leathery gauntlets kind and hesitantly rough in untapped strength he’s been too soft to touch on around Edward; and he adored that, drank up mouthfuls thirsty, and wished no so much of it went to feed the rooted guilt in mix with the happy seconds they got in between runaway leads and adult-built missions.

If anything, Ling would be the one to understand the restlessness of idly sitting and waiting. After all, he’d traveled that desert in search of myths and immortality wearing the lives of those waiting a clan away behind him on his shoulders as if it were a life-force. The sense-memory of  _them_ healing his wounds ghosted and pumping stronger blood in a way Greed’s souls and shield could never.

Ling still turns his head into the crook of Edward’s neck, half-bent at the waist.  “I have you at hug-point. Surrender now you emotionally constipated fiend and come to bed,” he whispers to the shell of Edward’s ear. “Read your book tomorrow. Promise it won’t have grown two legs and run away.”

Against himself, a shiver runs him up and down. Edward bends into the affection, like a cat curled and lapping delightfully in the spill of sun against hardwood-cut flooring, as he half-snorts in quiet amusement. “That’s not what ’m worried ‘bout. If I haven’t figured out how to grow another leg at this point I don’t think my book can do much better.”

Ling stops and blinks there. Then he butts his temple to Edward’s back, whining, “ _Oh my_   _god_.  _Ed_.”

Cheekily, Edward nudges his nose when Ling’s head comes up again, grinning wicked with all teeth. “Come on, y’know I had to.”

Ling shoves his head into the meeting crook of shoulder and neck, head shaking uproariously with laughter quivering through the course of strong arms tugging tighter, as if holding on and preparing for the line to startled and dive, like a startled fish being wrought up to land and sky. “You literally didn’t,” he says.

Then, Edward’s gasping involuntarily and lips are trailing across his pulsepoint, cracked and damaged and lighting something warm in Edward’s gut that won’t be put out, bright and belly-burning in a blaze of consuming adoration until he’s nothing but. Maybe he always has been, just that. A fierce love threatening to let him waste away at other’s bidding. Maybe that’s why he’s let so few in, because the few that do can ruin everything.

“Mm, ‘kay that’s enough,” he says, fingers coming up by fives and palming at a cheek feeling for the depressions of dimples and ridges of cheeky grins. “Lemme get back to reading now please,”

Ling juts his pointy chin back on Edward’s shoulders. “But how can you read if your book is gone?”

A gloved hand stretches, pats uselessly at the table wood, and, when found nothing but tracks of dust outlining the place now pathetically empty of book, curses himself. “You sneaky asshole. That was a dick move and you know it.”

A smile curls lengthy along Ling’s cheeks, warming them with a flush of pink. He looks handsome like this, some traitorous part of Edward’s brain says, handsome smiling. Handsome happy. Ling says, “Come on, it’s o’clock cuddle time now,” and takes Edward’s wrists that flutter up uselessly, like a minute beat of butterfly wings, and barely makes to guide him back to the a mattress before he’s pressing him into it. Pinning him cuddles and soundly dozing.

Edward feels the smile against his neck all the same.

Because that same bit of mind that thinks Ling is handsome and happy that gives in ultimately; because it’s always easier to give into the ebb and flow, let the riptide take you, devouring ravishingly.

 

**_________**

 

One day, Heinkel asks, in casually conversation like it belongs when it reality it is anything but, “You ready for the Promised Day, kid?”

“Sure,” Edward says and thinks feverishly: hell no.

It’s cutting him open, ugly and wounded.

 

**_________**

 

“You old man don’t seem to bad,” Darius hums mildly over the rim of his highball glass filled in by syrup-dark liquid.

It’s the first and cheapest seen stand, red and yellow pinstripe alcove with enough room for all of them positioned in a tight fit squeeze of balled nervous in a knot and a dead-eye enough worker that doesn’t look closely at the curious resemblance Edward has with—now saying  _FUCK BRADLEY_ in black pen—posters of that leering twelve-year-old stink-eye. It’s also the first time they’ve been back to the fugitive four of them since Edward’s pride and joy roundhouse on Hohenheim.

The reaction so visceral to be knee jerk, a fantasy he warmed by the few years after the door swung in slow closure on them, and still even after the fact Edward’s hunched over with wrung out guilt stretching him thin by all the skin he has left.

 _Ling would help_ , he thinks, wrestling down that want into silence as he imagines that sunny grin so off parading on Greed’s curiousness peering over his own cup lip. There hasn’t been a word from him, and Edward reins in the urges that swim against him current-like.

He hisses venomously, “That man’s a  _bastard_ ,” with such conviction it startles a chock and sputtered gasp, fist pounding on his chest for Heinkel to breath openly again.

“God, kid.” Darius winces. “Still got a set of lungs on ya, huh. What are you going to do? Keeping ignoring the man forever throwing a tantrum whenever you see him?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Edward whisper-yells. “I don’t see how you’d understand, animal.” Icefall places them still. Both beady eyes narrow, dauntlessly working over every inch of Edward’s anger, by every threadbare, seething smoke and steam from every seam. Edward glares back, unforgiving.

He knows full well the extent that what he did stretches to, soldiers on in the only way he knows how. Teeth bared, teeth biting. Claws out.

“Watch it,” Darius says dangerously.  

“Then how about you shut up and stop sticking your snout where it doesn’t belong!” Edward shoots back.

“Yes I can when it involves all of our lives,” Darius growls evenly. “You can’t be stubbornly holding a grudge like this.”

“This,” heaves Edward, “doesn’t involve you. He left _us_.” He could have called, he could have explained, he could have written, he could have  _saved_ them. He didn’t, in the end.

“Kid—”

“Don’t fucking call me small!” Edward shouts, snapping to both feet and sending the marketplace bar stool crashing to dirt bodily. He’s heaving, heavy. Pinpoints on that because the rest is to much, small is familiar as it is awful, comforting as much as it tears and rips and reminds him of summer smiles saying,  _Ed,_   _my little man_ , how that warped horribly to something hanged over above his head. (He can’t cry anymore, lost ability as if it’s aged and wane like gray shallow rocks hanging cliffside with everything he’s seen burned to the tops of his eyelids, so he rages, rather, instead.) “Shut up, shut up!”

His nails embed in the skin over his ears, flaking with caught hair that flutters against his knuckles and curls, if only to stop himself from letting them beat wild without control, to keep himself from becoming a ball of wound up stress and all other awful anxieties. He forces his body soulfully still as blood and mind tremble inside him with force.

“Kit, pip down you’re drawing to many eyes to us. Do either of you want another repeat of what happened in that one place?” Heinkel asks soothingly, placating a hand on Heinkel’s left shoulder. Space away from Edward. Appeasing both. “Remember Pran?”

Edward sniffs prudently as he drags the hair tie from his braid to neaten it with stiff rolling knuckles through rims of unsteady fingers just to do something. “We don’t talk about Pran.”

“What happened in Pran stays in Pran,” Darius finally agrees sagely, minute quiet, drawling on a long sip from the bottom of his ceramics coffee mug a creamy blue. His eyes flicker down to the leg-sided chair.

“When I take over the world I think I’ll just take Pran off the map,” Greed says and that’s the end of that.

Except for the fact, that Edward is a live wire glowing hotter under every stutter of breath, everything amounting to this moment of this life, building up mountainous from the second where Edward met his hopeful brother’s eyes across the marketplace bought scrawls of chalk that stuck to all parts of his clothes and skin, to now still chalk-stained at the cuffs of his sleeves and a younger brother’s eyes burning red.

That night, he recalls, was raining in sheets of the stuff, the two of them vertical to the glow of the transmutation circle, contently familiar with it’s lines and curl-tips. How he’d felt his lips flicker, and finally,  _finally_ they wouldn’t be alone and he would be right in this. A subsequent consequence.

He’s tired and wants to forgot selfishly, but coal hot in his pocket the certified, state issued silver dragon watch burns a hole straight down and feels like a million weighted tons. He swallows.

When Edward was six or seven, at the prime of his pouts, all lower lip and big wide eyes that melted oceans which his mother would glance and with an air of immovable victory would tilt her head just so slightly, digging the fingertip to palm radius of her warm, dirt-blunt hands making a mess with his bangs.  _Another Trisha,_ neighbors whispered when they walked to the marketplace of town, Alphonse nodding of where the column of their mother’s shoulder became neck and then chin to tuck him under nicely. They weren’t looking at him though, all eyes of Edward’s lot of lower lips and guileless grip.

 _Come on,_ she said off to the side, stern in it.  _The sun isn’t going to wait on you to pick up your feet again, little man. If we don’t get groceries now, we’ll get home late. And I’ve heard doing your share of the chores in company of the moon isn’t all the great,_ and Edward would reply,  _Well_ I’ve  _heard the moon’s a better friend than the stupid sun,_ just to disagree which got him a wicked curl of her lips and another rough rub of the knuckles atop his head. He let her, because, Edward thought with no little intent, one of Trisha Elric’s Biggest Pet Peeves would be a later calvary from an arsenal of choice when always map around back to the front patio of home. Grinning all toothy he’d pushed his head higher in her ire.

His mother’s face that day, Edward could remember crystal clear, peering up from under long lashes and childhood daze, was lovely, like that. Kind around her smiles, brisk walk and talk, and kept under mat and key mischief that sparkled luminescent like jeweled, desert sands under starlight. Lovely like this.  

Six or seven (he can’t remember, the best moments blurred and photo filtered to his mounts of acid frustration) when his hate for Hohenheim was still bad tempered dislike, he keeps the memory of his mother lovely at the frontal lobe of his mind. But his brain gets away from him in fleeting moments, and all he can think of is the stand-in of the front runner of her smile, traded auburn hair to a cat’s nest, honey skin expired and pasty.

Remembers when he’d ripped out the door, murder on its hinges, worry like a pulsing bee in his throat. His mother angled on the ground, shock trembled down each and every vertebrae, gluing open his eyes to his brows painfully. How she had mumbled,  _Hohenheim,_ and Edward’s gut rolled, undiminishing the worry as Alphonse presences alighted him by his back, gentle as a butterfly wing. Quiet the whole time, with a wetness behind his eyes that stung. Edward clenched his jaw—dental care be damned—two small fingers knitted in with one another the whole way to Granny’s.

In the poor placated waiting room put together with a scraped up bench he dangled his feet off of and remnants of a mudroom candle lit in the slope of the ceilings that Alphonse watched as if they were The Most Interesting Possible Thing In The Universe, and stretch of greenery walls, he’d said chin up in defiance, “I want my mom,” with that same tone the military men used when marching through Resembol by parading lines of three to two.

Granny sighed, longsuffering before taking a sharp inhale. Exhaled. “For God’s sake, she’s resting now, brat. Keep down that voice before she can’t even do that.”

“I want my mom,” he repeated, undeterred but this time at a much lower pitched and curled from his lip like the smoke plumes of Granny’s pipe did, the way it bit wrong and uncomfortable into the side of his cheek. He thought:  _I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to cry_. “What happened to her? Why was she on the ground?”

“You mother is very sick,” Granny told him shortly. “She isn't feeling well right now.”

“ _I’ve_ been sick before and I’ve never just fell to the floor like that!” Edward pressed, glowing angry vibrences of red by the moment. Granny glared and that fell shut, but still constricted in a close place to his heart. Festering wound.

“When is she going to be okay?” Alphonse piped up quietly hushed, as if that would have masked the crack in his voice and sniffle clogging his throat. And all that hurt rushed out like water and Edward slumped uselessly offering little comfort of bumping shoulders side by side.

“That,” Granny said, making a minor adjustment to the slant of her glasses, “Al, is a good question. We’ll find an answer in the morning and no sooner than that. All we can do now is wait. The two of you can share Winry’s room with her, while Trisha’s sleeping the guest.”

 _The other name for sickbay_ , Edward thought and said, standing panicked, “Granny—”

He’d startled back on his words, stomach pooling with some deep wrenched wrongness, and scowling, trying to chase away the white-hot feeling of Granny’s pinning gaze. She’s sharp, all edges and a knife’s blade since the delivered news of her son and daughter-in-law arrived perhand by the same blue coat, straight back military men that rolled out their shoulders and read off  _the accident of Urey and Sarah Rockbell, found in an illegal Ishvalan care camp nursing traitors_ , just like the ones that come into their automail treatment, all hooded-eyed and fractured crows feet marring their tired lined faces. There’s no blunt end about her, gentles only coming and going with Winry and moments like this. Edward’s seen her before, delivering the news to the Crowley’s blocks down when their Aunt’s ribs spasmed and the little thrums locked and key behind the chest cage dwindled, then dulled.

On her heel she left without any words.

During that last fleeting breach of contact, Edward shifted his head on the green plaster wall and thought about he will most certainly not cry, and how he won’t let anyone see him do so. Heat pricked instant. Helpless and naked and all alone, he ground those between his teeth and spat them out, pressed a little closer to his brother.

“I want dad, brother,” Alphonse pleaded next to him, bracing big eyes sizes of moons, tears be damned pouring from them like rainfall. “I want him. When is he coming home?”  

And Edward swallowed on bile and spit before it could burn. Worried on his lip with a tooth or two, his heartbeat bruising. I hate him, he decided there in that then suddenly. Young and inexperienced with it, that pool of liquid flame that poured in his gut. Didn’t know how to clamp out and throw it back like acid yet, eroding at all the internal parts of him important.

Darius had said to him,  _You can’t be stubbornly holding a grudge_ , and Edward has never felt vindication from just letting things go, so he steams quietly, whistling like vaper boiling his blood. Never been a carried gene to candidly bow their neck to the first whetstone cut sword in the family.

“Shut up and don’t talk to me, bastard. You spilled the tragic backstory yada-yada and I told you want Granny wanted so you can just leave me alone now,” is the first thing Edward says, separated from the cluster fuck group that still lingers with the fractions of tension.

“I understand if you don’t want to forgive me. I just—I only wanted to tell you, that after the revolving situation around The Dwarf in the Flask is completed, well—er, do you have plans, for returning your brother back to himself again?” asks Hohenheim, completely toeing past everything Edward laid out the moment he sat benched five feet away from the fireside moat between then (and isn’t that just rude, some delirious part of him thinks hilariously), then goes and nods sagely like the harsh stun of no reply spelled out everything. “As I suspected.”

Edward’s blood cements. The way he said it, vowels and olden accent faded like a ocean cliff beaten into, rough in pronunciation of  _brother_ snags something carnal in Edward—feels too much like an accusation, the flash image of Alphonse jutting ribs like prison bars an incriminating thing at the front of his mind—waves beating the dead horse over again, as he levels down his own glare that bubbles across skin blisteringly.

His temper is an elastic rubber band worn, reined back, and then  _snaps_. Accusing he snarls out, “  _Listen_ , I’ve have enough of this passive aggressive, ‘  _oh your hair’s longer, the house is burnt down’_ bullshit to last me a whole second goddamn lifetime. We wake up tomorrow and first thing is some old asshat that’s lived in a basement for the last couple centuries with his own strap on Messiah complex is going to try and kill everyone, so please, forgive me if I’m not quite in the mood for it. Just remember that you left and disappeared of the face of the Earth, so you can’t give me  _shit_.”

Hohenheim winces and quilt flares in that familiar curled in torso way Edward’s become a well enough acquaintance with, only serving to annoy him more. Evenly, he says, “I know.”

“You  _left_ ,” Edward repeats, judge, jury, and executioner, “you left us and you never came back. Not when Al turned five, or when mom  _died_ , or when Al and me —” the breath chokes him, living  _hurts_ then, so he brings himself back up again, all of it spilling in the open without meaning to— “you didn’t come back. Not for any of it.”

“Edward,” Hoenheim begs.

He ignores it. “You say I ran away? Well you walked out the damn door first. And you left Al thinking you’d come back. But you’re not. You’re going to let him down again, aren’t you? Just like you always fucking have.” The tips of his fingers scream for contact, but it’s years too late. It fizzles and dies, then goes and burns and itches all at once. His face a mask of older brother, as the lump in his throat gets a bit harder to go down. “I raised that kid since no one else would,” Edward tells him. “After mom died I did all that: got him dressed, helped him with schoolwork, tucked him in. You didn’t. You don’t get a claim to the kind of people we turned out to be.” Why would you want that bearing, seeing what’s he’s turned into?

The truth is burning and like looking into the sun seeing it all for the fire and roaring settlement of gases too hot for life or even admiration seen from quick glances. Hohenheim has always been the unsteady set of swings on parkways, and Edward knows he’s  _bad_ , because he saw a figure in play pretend place for a father that slunk in shadowed studies banned from those human because he lacks that, sending cold eye glares for children to take as tearful goodbyes.

He didn’t  _care_ , and it was all his fault because it would be the very thing to break Edward in the cut-edge pieces he’s been mending with scraps of metal and bolts if it was anything but. He wasn’t supposed to, at least.

It's worse that he cares, that he’s nothing like what Edward’s imagined. It's worse he's trying because that means he always has capable of thought outside of selflessness and selfishness. His claim to a grasp of repentance cost Edward  _everything_.

Warring ties to blood still and blood spilt clash inside him, duel-edges of the same sword hurt just as much the second time wielded, and there’s now flow to the ebb of this because the ocean is in battle, waves breaking overhead, trying to drag him down in a tangled mess sitting right beneath his breastbone. He can’t forgive that.

But Alphonse does and he’s always been the better brother hand picked from the two of them because of it. Alphonse has never flinched awry from the full harshness of summer’s shine and even with all his hard edges that clip at skin and graft uncomfortably he’s always been the softer for it. Trust swells in him too largely. Edward’s had to fight tooth and nail to keep it from imploding in the brilliance equal of that to a stars death.

Hand white-knuckling the bug bitten, frayed hem of his sweater wear that’s been one of the few things he’s had, kept greedy to himself in clenched hands similar to a orphan’s. He’s had to fight kicking all his life, for everything he’s had all the while shielding a younger brother in arms, eyes wide and always believing so much so he couldn’t bear to break that brittle.

“You might be a good man, Hohenheim,” says Edward, exhausted, strong again in every way he’s had to be since  _five_ , keeping certain the way his voice is steady and tracks movements of this silent moment that stretched for too long, “but that doesn’t make you a good father.” He’s just tired, now.

Hohenheim half reaches, hand limply swinging back as if stricken from a flame. Edward hates how much it hurts, still. “Edward, I—”  
“Just,” he breaths out, swallowing the watery emotions, blood, bile, and all that feels like razors cutting edge along hollowed open flesh, brought down to begging: “Leave me alone.”

 

**_________**

 

Hohenheim does listen, a yawning cavity and rot, an open wound raw and biting he refuses to let heal (but maybe a bit of Edward’s always been a masochist, while he can’t lust for body right with everyone else). It doesn’t feel as self-serving as it should, just perhaps, more disappointment to add to his shoulder set.

Ling meets him where you could spot the body of horizon curling like a god’s faraway grin. Tight lipped and inaccurate because truth is, it’s smiles are wide and toothful with dents as dimples the size of craters and universes.

They stand there, two twin peaks staring down the accusing finger of the apocalypse in lapping waves of silence.

He’s all legs and well-worn skin, ten times as terrible from when Edward first met him—corner alleyway, dead-fish face first in concrete starving something awful and with a sunny face that blinded and glared annoyingly—breezy conversation, fist-to-cuffs-ready affection poured into care and attention, warm around the mouth, and still so soft and scruffy, and grinning without any take-backs, leaving Edward doubled over screaming without breath in his stolen lungs.

 _Terrible, terrible, terrible,_ Edward thinks, affectionate. Taken and gone. Proof in the foiled, white-knuckle grip he’s got curling around the bunches of grass.  

“Did he love her?” and for his credit, Edward doesn’t startle, staying stony and soul-crushed in all his worth as Ling comes closer still because he’s never cowarded from poking a sleeping bear, pointlessly adding for contexts sake: “Your mother, I mean. Did your father ever love her?”

“He left,” says Edward, and great now he’s sounding like a broken record player with the same mantra backwards on his tongue. It’s cracked and weak, even to him.

“But did he love her?”

Edward breathes through his teeth. “Yeah. Yeah he did.” Has to breath out, brace himself with fists and iron, setting his jaw callous. “When he left, I thought—” he stops, finds the words that puzzle together the best he can— “I thought that it was my fault. I fucked up or did something wrong and he left. That never really left, so in order to feel like less a total failure I then thought that he was a no good bastard that didn’t care about his family and and his kids and his lover—not even wife, the asshole never had the guts to even  _marry her_ —and, just—” Edward blinks. His throat feels choked, his skin too tight, violent shudders gut him in his entity and he thinks: oh.

Ling squeezes his hand.

He wants, he wants he wants. Wants to let go, saddle himself on full, to let himself close his eyes that break like the swell of a wave over emotion, exhaustion that lead him off drowsy but with complete awareness steam fueled by the tense of his shoulders under the jackets and shirts, the flicker of wary born eyes.

Let his eyelids filter close in butterfly wing fluttering, shut down and close up after days stretching their quota marked hours that’s been his life for months. But Ling’s fingers are warm and fully of ringers so he holds onto them tighter, until there pasted white and palely, mountains to jump stopping him from getting up and pacing obnoxious dulled but viligent. Frames himself to stop from convulsing in an ironic twist.

He squeezes back. Ling’s eyes on him like headlights catch, as that willowy frame wanting so much resolves itself to Edward. “I hate him so,  _so_ much,” he whispers, hoarsely. 

“I know,” says Ling.

“I shouldn’t but I still—” Edward swallows, shaking his head wanting to thrash around and let it out but only tightens his anchor on Ling. Ling’s fingers, Ling’s palms, Ling’s scars and nicks.  _I hate that I still want care about him_. He can’t admit that, just yet. “I wish he never came back. I want to have never had to seen his shitty beard and nerdy square glasses and dumb expression of never knowing what’s going on ever again. Al doesn’t deserve all this. I came up with the worst ideas about him, sure, but Al always thought the best of the bastard. He’ll just be let down.”

“I know,” says Ling. “Personally, I really,  _really_ want today to be over.”

Edward grins, weak and watery. “That’s awfully greedy of you, Ling Yao.”

Ling smiles. It’s dangling, threadbare. “Yeah,” he agrees, “but I think, after everything, I deserve that much at least.” His shoulder brushes Edward’s. “You too.”

Edward bumps his back, friendly. Breaths. “Did you know, when me and Al were super young and just after dad left we tried to find out about other family members behind our mom’s back,” he says. “Of course she knew, we were  _five_ and not sneaky in the slightest, but we came up with nothing ‘cause apparently mom was orphaned in Resembol when she was two.” Pinako had told them years later, when he was eleven and willing to take anything greedily to lose some mindfulness of the pain and bolted scars tissuing against the bone that swelled in drugged haze all too aware on the operating table.

It takes a village to raise a child; the pitch in of the seamstress lady who also pressed sweets bow topped with ribbons made in shiny crystallized glitter to the like lines of their palms, farmers enroute to mapping work fields landmarked by the sole of rubber boots fossilized in the dirt packed rubbing elbows with Trisha, the old couple owning the only shop store which always waved off directions to the following eyes towards quick market sales.

“They’re nice, but we were brothers first,” Alphonse said to him, sticky lips palely purple-pink and soft from syrup concoctions in midst the sweet center of jewel-like hardened candies. They hadn’t been raised by a village, neighbors half-stranger, half-friend few in between. They had been brought up by a mother until she gave her last breath in whispy reassurance set goodbye, then lingered at the corners of stray figures that never fit fully with the silhouette, no matter how close the more Edward flinched. The object of his affections, his family left is wrapped up coldly in frostbitten metal forged by the iron fist of warmed hardships.

“Now,” says Edward, “there’s a whole life, a history that the bastard just drops on us, literally the night before the fucking  _end of the world_ —seriously, who in their right mind   _does that_?—and I don’t….” He doesn’t know what to do with it. And isn’t if that just a sucker punch to the ties of an already fraying faith. He still feels tired.

“We still have people waiting for us,” Ling says, echoing something long, long ago. “Allies, friends.”

“My brother.” Edward jerks, a half aborted movement written as habit that always calls blood to blood. They’re dangling in moonlight, feet squared at the edge, hanging on by just the flesh of their fingers and everything is screaming in Edward to gather Alphonse and Ling in his arms and not fight, not die, so he doesn’t.

Ling looks, drinks setting light like a hungry man, shines in it, thrives in the dark sought out shine that complete night brings, and he understands. He says, “Go to him, Ed. I have to go find Lan Fan, and Greed...he has his own agenda to check off today.”

It takes a village to raise a child, but Edward’s been brought up by ghosts and things that should have been put to rest six feet under eons ago. His arm throbs, shivering smoothen silver sitting crafted artfully on right of him. One half his hubris, and all Alphonse’s.

Ever since thirteen Edward’s been unwinding the child wrought lessons and instruction by every stem to reteach a way to school back the wetness that gathers at the corners of his eyes, how to sink his back molars into sobs and hold them there, how to clench his fists and shake in anger because that’s easier and that’s expected and that’s all he can feel at times. Soulful metal can’t, and sinners shouldn’t.

He wants to, now, forces his hands open and undone away from Ling, warring with the duel-urges to run and stay. But for a moment their eyes lock, and Edward knows, his loyalties, stripped bare and open for plain eyes to see. So all he does is say: “Die and I’ll drag you back by the ear to pay that bill you still owe me.”

Ling, still watching—with that secretive and warmly worried attention, murmurs, “It’ll be a date. I’ll see you then, Ed, when this is all over and we’ve won.”

“Yeah,” Edward says and swallows. He doesn’t take one last kiss from a second in time, refuses another millisecond to brush his thumb along the apple’s of Ling’s cheek because he’s so,  _so_ tired and if he gives into that much-needed reprieve of the crafted suffering bled open again he won’t even be able to get up again. He does, though, give himself a decisecond to believe this. “When we’ve won.”

**Author's Note:**

> greed, at ed and ling's pinning: seriously?? right in front of my salad
> 
> • the ending is suppose to be somewhat open ended, but meant to be hopeful in nature


End file.
